EDU 508: Quantitative and Mixed Methods in Educational Settings: Resources for Interviews and Data Coding

This is the website for an open-source coding analysis software, hosted by the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh, and QDAP-UMass at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. CAT may prove more useful for your upcoming thesis research project.

This page has information on each step of the qualitative research interview process, and provides a clear, simple overview. It is part of the online support resources for postgraduate study skills provided by the Open University of the United Kingdom, which covers many other topics of interest to graduate students.

This is a section from "The Qualitative Research Guidelines Project" by D. Cohen & B. Crabtree. It discusses the five types of interviews, gives tips for developing an interview guide, and provides an extensive reference list. The guidelines were originally developed for research in healthcare.

The Online QDA Project, created and maintained by the Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Huddersfield, is a site devoted to qualitative data analysis. Here you will find many resources that will be of use when you are coding your data and thinking about data analysis software.

This video by Kent Löfgren of Umeå University, Sweden, is a step-by-step guide for analyzing interview data. Dr. Löfgren's specialization is research in education.

This article by Gery W. Ryan of RAND and H. Russell Bernard of the University of Florida describes techniques for identifying themes, as the title says, and examples of these techniques. The article looks at the whole research process, but all the techniques can be applied to the post-interview coding process.

A very practical guide from the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement at Stanford University's Institute for Higher Education Research, this page includes checklists for interview researchers and interview protocols, tips on interviewing, and references.

This is a post for the blog, "The Listening Resource," by Susan Eliot. It describes guidelines for setting up your data in Excel to help you analyze the data more effectively. Depending on the data size of your 508 project, you might find this resource will be more useful for your larger, future projects. The blog's original website has gone down. To read the original post, click on the "here" in "View cached version (text only) here." It will download as a Word document.

This page by Dr. Mary Stokrocki of Arizona State University gives a broad overview of interviewing with an emphasis on cultural studies. While the example questions deal mostly with art, the focus on the interviewee's context and the step-by-step instructions for conducting the interview apply to educational studies as well. There are also references for further reading.