Strategies for Managing and Organizing Qualitative Data

Managing Qualitative Data
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Managing Qualitative Data
When doing research, one comes up with a lot of data that is often not well organized or characterized. It is just a raw data that does not have a particular way for understanding it or no specific pattern that can be read through it. Such is the basic definition and understanding of qualitative data. Qualitative data has a variety of data from different sources: holding interviews with different respondents, filling questionnaires, recording observed data, making notes from online research, and survey notes. When this raw data is assembled it becomes a mountain of raw data that is not well organized and it’s not appealing to work on. This discussion will focus on two strategies that would help a researcher manage and organize the data.
Strategies
One of the major strategies is to collect enough field notes. Having enough data notes is very important during data arrangement and analysis, skipping some data during collection may lead to misinterpretation of data (Gibbs, 2018). Data collection is not limited during research, recording every detail is essential, without assuming anything. Observations are very crucial and to some extent even audio recording taken, a video record is the best. Observations and every detail has to be descriptive as much as possible without being judgmental of the people or events observed.
Secondly, extensive training of staff. An ethnographer should be skilled, sharp-minded and fast in the interpretation of what is observed into notes. When doing research, one has to embrace friendly talking. More importantly one has to be persuasive if interacting with strangers during research. After raw data collection, the data has to be stored well without losing or...