13.1: Analysis Strategies

Learning Objectives

• Define ethnomethodology and describe its purpose.

• Define and describe conversation analysis.

• Define grounded theory and describe each of the 3 major coding methods.

Introduction

Qualitative analysis is the analysis of qualitative data such as text data from interview transcripts. Unlike quantitative analysis, which is statistics-driven and largely independent of the researcher, qualitative analysis is heavily dependent on the researcher’s analytic and integrative skills and personal knowledge of the social context where the data is collected. The emphasis in qualitative analysis is “sense-making" or understanding a phenomenon, rather than predicting or explaining. A creative and investigative mindset is needed for qualitative analysis, based on an ethically enlightened and participant-in-context attitude and a set of analytic strategies. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these qualitative analysis strategies.

Analysis Strategies

Though not unique methods of data collection per se, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are unique enough, and prominent enough in sociology, that they warrant some dedicated attention in this text.

1. Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology refers to the study of everyday reality. Rather than assume that the purpose of social science is to understand some objective reality, ethnomethodologists investigate how people construct, prolong, and maintain their realities. The term ethnomethodology was coined by sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967), who was a sociologist who delved into the minutiae of everyday life. Ethnomethodology’s emphasis on the everyday and on ordinary people’s methods for producing order in their social worlds is perhaps its most distinctive characteristic. Few initiatives in sociological theory have resulted in a wider range of innovative research than Garfinkel's foundational studies, which demonstrate the organization of details in social life and their consequences for social order.

Recent applications of ethnomethodology continue to explore how individuals reproduce social categories and power dynamics in everyday settings. For example, sociologist C.J. Pascoe's (2023) research delves deep into the social worlds of teachers, students, parents, and administrators at an American high school. Pascoe explores how an everyday "regime of kindness" actually fails to address deep-seated inequalities, contributing instead to a shallow cultural environment. Similarly, Brandon Folse (2024) published an action research study examining the increasing ubiquity of "gamification" in everyday life, focusing on its normalization as a motivational tool.

2. Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) grew out of ethnomethodology and thus shares its focus on the construction of reality as opposed to the discovery of reality. Conversation analysts focus specifically on talk in interaction: how talk progresses, how it is facilitated or impeded, how turns are taken in talk, and how these processes both shape and are shaped by social context. In conversation analysis, the basic unit of analysis is the turn-at-talk. Turns form sequences and are designed to accomplish specific social actions, revealing the orderly, publicly observable structure of social life.

CA treats language not as an abstract system but as a resource for social action, where meaning is collaboratively produced in real time. Contemporary applications of conversation analysis have expanded significantly. For example, Thompson et al. (2024) utilized conversation analysis to inform empirically driven communication interventions in medical and health-focused research designs. Another recent study advocates for advancing CA in sport and exercise sciences to develop evidence-based interventions and communication training, highlighting how everyday interaction impacts athletic and psychological outcomes.

3. Grounded Theory

Grounded theory is an inductive qualitative research methodology used to develop theory directly from systematically collected and analyzed data. Unlike traditional research approaches that prioritize testing pre-existing hypotheses, grounded theory focuses on building understanding directly from the data. Data collection and analysis occur in overlapping, iterative cycles. Researchers utilizing grounded theory engage in four distinct stages of ongoing analysis: codes, concepts, categories, and theory. While traditional social studies prioritize the validity of findings, a grounded theory is uniquely judged by its fit, relevance, workability, and modifiability.

The grounded theory approach requires that researchers suspend any preexisting theoretical expectations or biases before data analysis and let the data dictate the formulation of the theory. Strauss and Corbin further defined this into three primary coding techniques for analyzing text data:

• Open Coding: This is a process aimed at identifying concepts or key ideas that are hidden within textual data, which are potentially related to the phenomenon of interest. The researcher examines the raw textual data line by line to break the data down into discrete parts. Similar concepts are then grouped into higher-order categories to reduce the amount of data the researcher must work with and build a “big picture” of the issues salient to understanding a social phenomenon.

• Axial Coding: The second phase of grounded theory is axial coding, where the categories and subcategories are assembled into causal relationships or hypotheses that can tentatively explain the phenomenon of interest. Researchers may use a coding scheme to understand which categories represent conditions, actions/interactions, and consequences.

• Selective Coding: The third and final phase involves identifying a central category or a core variable and systematically and logically relating this central category to other categories. New data is selectively sampled to validate the central category and its relationships to other categories. Coding of new data and theory refinement continues iteratively until theoretical saturation is reached, meaning additional data no longer provides any new insights into the core categories.

Key Takeaways

• Ethnomethodology: Ethnomethodologists study everyday reality and how people produce those realities through their presentations of self and interactions with others.

• Conversation Analysis: Conversation analysts focus specifically on the dynamics of talk.

• Grounded Theory: Grounded theory provides important and systematic ways to code and analyze qualitative information.