I don't see why you couldn't. You could take each statement/bullet point and have them sorted into categories/themes to see if they make sense. You can do this manually or use software. It might have been better to have a transcript of the group discussions, but you still might get good information from what you have.

I have some doubts. In the end the research would be on your colleague understanding of the experts summaries, nor on the opinion of the experts. Yes, one can say that the notes of your colleague are a sort of coding, but not having the original transcript or recording no one can (neither you) check and validate this coding activity. To be clear, I never heard of some reviewer that checked a content analysis, but often they require some validation index of the coding (which presumes that there have been at least two different coders), moreover some peer-to-peer review ask to submit dataset and corpus of analysis. Beside this problems related to publication requirement, missing the original material is a problem for you, for the quality of your research, for the possibility to come back to the rough material and develop new ideas and interpretations.

Nicola Palladino, so does this imply that qualitative analysis for such purposes may not be publishable unless based on audio recordings (which, as we know, may reduce the likelihood of people being transparent or disclosing certain information), or notes taken by more than one coder?

Workshop as a research method has widely been discussed but whether you can analyse them through thematic or content analysis is not very clear from the nature of the data that you have. They were summarised. In my case I did narrative analysis without any clustering of the data and managed to publish a paper out of that. check the references for more on Workshops.

Preprint Practitioners' perspectives on land resource conflicts and r...

Two books to consider: Yin "Case study research" and Krippendorff "Content Analysis".

I think that it is possible to apply thematic analysis to notes. However, it would be better if the notes are structured as a text or short phrases, not as concise bullet points or as keywords.

In your case, I think that the main issue is that you can have some transcriptions of what participants said and some phrases that are comments of your colleague. This means that the comments of your colleague can be a mix of what people said and of what he infers in the function of his (academic) knowledge and background. You can't be sure that what he wrote is entirely accurate from the participants' perspective. Maybe, one solution could be the participants' evaluation of the notes and the findings.

Good luck!

In general, content analysis concentrates morse on the "manifest content" of the data, and is thus more descriptive. In contrast, thematic analysis aims for "latent content" and is thus more interpretive. Given the limits of your data, I think a more descriptive content analysis would be a better fit.

On seeing this question in my Inbox, I was about to post "Why not"; but I must however, agree with David, immediately above. With Thematic Analysis in this case, you would be interpreting interpretations, thereby putting your research on dubious ground regarding validity; firmer ground is to be had here by implementing Content analysis.

Just a different point of view related to research ethics. As you have converted this to a qualitative rearch and you are going to publish this work, you need to take consent from the participants as this feedback was given for a different purpose.

Harshini Rajapakse, I already have ethical approval to analyse the data and publish it.

Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay, thanks so much for your helpful response! I didn't use pre-set codes. I had some general questions I wanted them to answer, but otherwise I also wanted to let them freely explore issues, so it's both bottom-up and top-down. I didn't use questionnaires - I only posed some questions they had to focus on during their small group discussions. The total sample size was 50, but I didn't capture individual responses, but rather the responses of those who represented each small group and however many of those 50 joined in as part of the general discussion (i.e. when all groups came together). Given this, I'd find it hard to do a content analysis. However, could I not go for a thematic analysis?

Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay thank you so much again - very helpful! Yes, my colleague took notes as group representatives were reporting back their discussion summaries. Also, I collected some notes from participants themselves (although not all of them submitted their notes).

It seems to me that your sample size is more related to the number of responses that you got (i.e., the number of discussion groups you conducted), rather than the total number of people who participated in those groups. Can you say more about how many groups there were and how detailed the data was each group?

Hi Raluca,

Absolutely, you can analyse summary notes taken during a workshop. I usually upload them and analyse them using the same qualitative package I would use to analyse the transcript of a semi-structured interview, for example (NVivo, QDA miner). You can also use these summary notes as a complement to other data in your research (if you have, like semi-structured interviews or documents related to your topic from the grey literature). For example, the notes may be used to support or contrast what you find in other forms of data and may be used to make your case stronger with complementary data. Just a thought.

All the best,

Jessica

Jessica Spagnolo thanks so much for your kind and helpful response! The only thing I could complement the notes taken by my colleague with is the notes taken by some of the participants themselves. We haven't done any semi-structured interviews...

Raluca Matei Also very interesting in my opinion as complementary information!! Happy coding!