Elizaveta Polukhina, Olga Savinskaya and Marina Alexandrova have published chapters in the book «Practices of Qualitative Data Analysis in Social Sciences»
Congratulations to our colleagues on the publication!
How the book was created, and what it is about, is told by its editor and one of the authors, Elizaveta Polukhina, associate Professor of the Department of Sociology, senior researcher at the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research (ILSIR) HSE:
Our book is the result of a long and diligent collective work of experienced and talented researchers. Three employees of our ILSIR, including me, have published their chapters in it. How many things happened around and with each of us while we were working on this edition… It is not surprising that this book is a continuation, the second part, since they usually analyze the collected data – interviews, observations, various media, and so on. The first edition of "How to collect data in a qualitative field study" was published in 2020. And it immediately became clear that the need for a methodological publication on the practices of analysis is no less relevant, because the issue of "analytical cuisine" is a key one in research work.
I am happy and grateful that the authors responded with interest to the invitation to write a chapter in our book and conscientiously worked on its completion for three (!) difficult years. It is thanks to an excellent team of experienced researchers that the book managed to show a variety of practices and methods of data analysis. I even envy our readers a little – on the pages you can find the answer to complex analytical questions – dilemmas of analysis about the choice of method and program, coding and its types, coding form, collective analysis and many others. Each chapter is accompanied by a description of key terms, examples and sequential analysis steps.
The book consists of three sections. In the first section in the first chapter, I suggest that the reader understand the specifics of qualitative analysis and navigate the methodological landscape. In general, the chapters of the first section are devoted to the history of the origin and examples of the application of methods and are structured from interpretive and descriptive methods (the chapter on narrative analysis by Irina Trotsuk, discourse analysis by Olga Gurova and Tatiana Romashko) to more formalized ones (for example, the chapter on qualitative content analysis by Olga Savinskaya).
In the second section, the authors use personal research examples to show the specifics of the data encoding and processing procedure. The most detailed chapter on coding is written by Svetlana Poleshchuk. The chapters are structured as the volume of data increases and the work is technologized – from a small amount of interview data that can be processed "on paper" (Natalia Mastikova (Voronina), to larger-scale data for which frequency distributions, correspondence analysis (Daria Rud), the text-mining direction (Alexandrova Marina). Many chapters of the second section demonstrate the specifics of working with various software such as NVivo (head of Anastasia Govorova), Dedoose (head of Alyona Nefedova and her co-authors Marina Spirina and Ekaterina Dyachenko), as well as Python, Atlas.ti.
In the third section of the book, the authors talk about the formats and ways of presenting the results of qualitative research. The chapters tell about the visual essay and work with photography (ch. Anna Pechurina), and about the variety of genres of public speaking (ch. Anna Strelnikova).
The comments of our reviewers, experts in qualitative methodology, Anna Semenovna Gottlieb, Oksana Zaporozhets and Oleg Oberemko helped in the work on the book. We are grateful to them for their attention to the book and help.
You can get acquainted with the contents of the book "Practices of Qualitative Data Analysis in the Social Sciences" on the LitRes website.
