We get case studies of people with mental illness from different countries. We want to analyze the stories for specific details like access to treatment, health and social improvement from the individual case studies, and then to consolidate them.
You can use either thematic method or narrative techniques depending on what you want to do. But I will definitely recommend narrative techniques because it gives you the opportunity to map out how mental illness is congruent or embedded with life and illness histories of the patients in different case, and then gives you ability to draw a central themes having identified all the defiant cases.
Hi, if this is a question about computer software packages, NVivo is a user friendly and widely used tool for qualitative analyses. You may see here for more information: http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx
I did my thesis with atlas-IT program and was a great help to me. is useful to encode the speech fragment and lets you connect with other some categories. I have to warn you that it is not very intuitive, as I think any other computer program that serves to do qualitative research.
In my opinion, qualitative research should not abuse the tools to do the analysis of discourses because we lose information. Computer programs are used to sort the codes or categories, but it has to be the researcher who values implicit meanings "traditional way"
I ve ben told that Alcestes is very useful as well.
You could use Case Study Analysis and refer to Yin's method of analysing case study data. This method involves investigating cases using a case protocol, which enables you to make good cross case comparisons, such as across the categories you have mentioned. If you are more of an interpretive researcher, descriptive/thematic methods would be effective. See Sandelowski for this
I do not know your field, but one possible strategy the social scientist use is codification of data (text) and then applying the ground theory method.
Like earlier comments re field, but if you do want to explore the data, the best advice is to read, read, and read it again. Don't rush to come up with codes. If you have a priori drivers then you may need to question if you need a soft ware as you are looking for something specific.
If you want a computer software QDA Miner 4 is free in a trial version and although limited to 20 codes is a good starting point for computer qualitative analysis. It also gives you the opportunity of add ons (at a price) but if you are trying to mix the methods utility in that as well.
As suggested already by Eleni, I would also recommend NVivo (if you're asking for tools rather than methodology). NVivo offers a lot of flexibility and allows you to incorporate various data sources, which I appreciate in my research so far.
Thank you for all the useful inputs and discussions. Based on your suggestions I did check the software tools (trial versions) and found them useful but needs time to master it. For the time being, we will go ahead with the 'traditional ways' of doing and will pick one of the software tools to better our results.