A Detailed Guide for Analysing Your Interviews For PhD Thesis

Depending on your topic area and the specifics of your thesis, the format of a PhD interview may change. You might be speaking to a hiring committee. Alternatively, you might simply meet your supervisor in the campus coffee shop and discuss your areas of interest in the study. No matter what the format of the interview will be, analyzing your interviews is important. A constant back-and-forth between the complete thesis data, the coded extracts of the interview you are analyzing, and the analysis of your thesis is required during the analysis.

Methods Of Analysing Your Interviews For PhD Thesis:

Interviews can be analyzed inductively and deductively.

Inductive Analysis Of Interviews:

These are divided into two categories:

Thematic Analysis:

Thematic analysis is a qualitative research method that allows you to identify, extract and organize the underlying themes in a large body of text. It's particularly useful for analyzing interviews. Thematic analysis is more than just finding the main points of an interviewee's answers and organizing them into categories. It's about understanding how those points connect to each other and how they work together to help you answer your research questions.

The thematic analysis involves two main steps: coding and memoing. Coding involves reading through the interviews and marking up passages that relate to each theme. This can either be done manually or through a computer program like NVivo or ATLAS-N software, which allows you to code entire documents at once. Memoing is where you write down notes on what each passage means and how it relates to other passages.

Narrative Analysis:

Narrative analysis is a qualitative research method that involves the systematic analysis of narratives. Narratives are defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as stories, accounts, or interpretations. Narratives can be found in many forms: interviews, transcripts, diaries, journals and memoirs. The goal of narrative analysis is to review these stories and find patterns within them. Hiring a thesis writing service is a good choice when working on this.

Example

Narrative analysis is a process that helps you identify patterns in your data. For example, if you're doing research on how people balance work and family life, you could conduct interviews with people who have a family history of mental illness and ask them about how they manage their work schedules. You could also interview people who do not have mental illness in their family and ask them about how they manage their work schedules. After conducting interviews with both groups of people, you could analyze the data using narrative analysis techniques to see if there are any differences between the two groups when it comes to balancing work and family life.

Deductive Analysis Of Interviews:

Contrarily, deductive analysis needs a methodical or predefined strategy. You will need to create categories in your thesis data before beginning its analysis. Then, you'll have to link them. These analysis techniques all have advantages for analyzing your interviews for a PhD thesis. However, the most widely used method is the thematic analysis proposed by Braun and Clarke.

Thematic Analysis Of Interviews:

The process of going from jumbled data to a map of the key themes in the data is described as iteratively through the use of thematic analysis. It has proved to be an effective method for analyzing your interviews for your PhD Thesis.

Steps Of Thematic Analysis:

There are six steps involved in the thematic analysis of interviews:

Familiarization:

The first step of thematic analysis is familiarization with the data and its context. Familiarization is necessary because this process allows you to understand the data better and identify its features. In addition, it helps you find a suitable way to code the data.

Generating Initial Codes:

The second step of thematic analysis is generating initial codes based on your understanding of the data and what you are looking for in it. Here, you need to look at all your interview transcripts and generate codes that help you analyze the information gathered from each interview transcript separately or as a whole.

You can use many different methods for generating initial codes including using open coding techniques where you start by reading through the transcript several times and writing down anything that catches your attention; closed coding techniques where you use existing categories from previous studies or other sources; or mixed approaches where you combine both open coding techniques with closed ones to optimize your results.

A good starting point for generating codes is to look for any words or phrases that are repeated several times. You can then group similar items together and create categories of these codes. As you read through your transcripts, try to keep an open mind as you generate and code the data to avoid falling into a rut where you only focus on one aspect of the research question.

Searching for Themes:

This step requires identifying themes from your generated codes by searching for commonalities between different codes within each transcript or across all transcripts collected from the study. You can do this by creating a table with one row for each transcript, and one column for each generated code. Then look at the data to see if there are any common themes between codes from different transcripts.

Synthesizing Your Results:

After you’ve identified the themes, the next step is to synthesize your results by creating a coding scheme (or taxonomy) that includes all of the categories used in your research. You can do this by organizing the codes into categories that make sense for your analysis. For example, if one of your codes is about gender roles and another code is about how people feel about their jobs, then you could create a category called “Work” or “Jobs” and place both of those codes in it.

Creating A Narrative:

In this last step, you take all of your findings and create a narrative that tells a story about them using quotes from your transcripts as evidence for each point in the story.

Conclusion:

The thematic analysis presents a somewhat simple procedure that enables you to begin analyzing your interview data; yet, as the analysis involves a lot of learning-by-doing, it pays to be aware of typical mistakes to avoid. Simply proceed one step at a time. As you go, the analysis process will become more obvious, giving you greater freedom to maximize the value of the information gleaned from your thesis for your interview.