My research design is phenomenology. Good! I conducted 33 in-depth interviews (IDI) and 11 focus group discussions in the field. A total of 95 people participated in the FGD. I have no plan to do a mixed-methods study, so there is no need for quantification. However, I have been told to present the percentages of the number of participants who said what and what. Is the calculation of percentages normal in this type of work? If normal, how do I go about it?
I will appreciate your response. I will also be happy if your responses come with some references where this kind of situation has been presented. Thanks.
No, it is not generally preferred to use percentages or counts with qualitative data. In particular, this kind of interview is not like a quantitative survey where everyone is asked the exactly the same questions with exactly the same response options. So, if someone did not mention something, you have no idea what they would have said.
In particular, counting is not consistent with a phenomenological approach, where the goal its to generate depth and detail on the lived experience of the participants.
It is not recommended to present your results in percentages, except when you undertake content analysis of specific responses among all the participants or when presenting participants demographic data.
Thank you very much David L Morgan for your consistent and valuable contributions to my research journey. Please I analysed the data thematically, however, I was also asked to treat the 33 in-depth interviews as cases (case by case basis). This is also another confusion.
Wow! Thank you very much for that new knowledge Abukari Kwame
I am doing thematic instead of content analysis, please.
John Peter Okoro Abukari Kwame Abukari Kwame David L Morgan David L Morgan Inyang Bassey Inyang This discussion is so interesting and I look forward to learning as much as I can from the discussants here. I’m also interested in phenomenology and key participant interviews for my PhD dissertation. Thank you for starting this important discourse.
In general, it is not recommended to combine phenomenological analysis with thematic analysis. In their recent book, Braun and Clarke (2022) compare their version of thematic analysis to Smith's interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), because these approaches both rely on coding. But IPA's use of coding is unusual among phenomenological approaches.
Even with IPA, your data set would be considered much too large for meaningful phenomenological analysis. Is there any reason why you couldn't do thematic analysis by itself?
David L Morgan Thank you for the insight. I think that the problem lies in my choice of phenomenological design as a type of qualitative approach that I see to be suitable for participants' live experiences based on my research objectives. Now, after conducting the number of IDIs and the FGDs, I realised that the data is very large, so I decided to opt for thematic analysis. At this point, is it advisable to rename the design to something else and avoid mentioning phenomenological design in the work?
Yes, I would recommend avoiding references to phenomenology and concentrate instead on thematic analysis.
In general, I think this kind of confusion is quite common because almost all qualitative research examines participants' lived experiences. The distinction is that phenomenology has quite specific procedures for doing so.
Great! Thank you very much, Professor David L Morgan
What type of qualitative approach would now be appropriate for the design, as thematic analysis is employed at the analysis level? I am asking because, in my part of the world, we are very good at asking: 'among the types of qualitative approaches, which did you apply' and 'what analytical method?'.
Unfortunately some books make it sound as if there are only a few well labeled approaches to qualitative research, when the most common design is simply to do semi-structured interviews followed by thematic analysis. This design is so widely used that it doesn’t have its own name.
David L Morgan Thank you very much for your time and for expanding my knowledge in this area.
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