ABSTRACT
The fact that distinctions can be made among at least twenty-six different kinds of approaches to qualitative research may seem discouraging. Does it mean that we have to learn about twenty-six different data analysis procedures as well? The answer is: no. The world of research is not tidy enough to provide us with a neat one-to-one correspondence between research interests and analysis procedures. For some approaches with a long tradition, such as ethnography or content analysis, the analysis process has become quite well defined. In more recent ones, such as collaborative inquiry or discourse analysis (which dates back only to the 1970’s), researchers are still exploring and inventing individually. In some cases, scholars have adopted analysis procedures of related approaches, and in still others researchers use their own terminology, but their steps and modes are in effect quite similar to some others that have been described in different words.
