ABSTRACT
With the fifth chapter, we go through qualitative data analysis. The chapter opens with a discussion of the nature, so to speak, of qualitative data, distinguishing among the texts and the artefacts with which we usually analyse different kinds of empirical material (representations, reproductions, and naturalistic data), each with a specific “authenticity range” (Topolski 1977: 434, original edition 1973), with a differentiated capacity to answer our research questions. The following section critically illustrates the logical structure of qualitative data analysis, moving from the notion of “categorisation” elaborated by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, meant as a “tentative and gradated, gray-shaded linking of an entity or a situation to a prior category in one’s mind” (Hofstadter, Sander 2013: 14). This kind of categorization, syntonic with Blumer’s idea of “sensitizing concepts” (Blumer 1969), is framed in a lean version of the Template Analysis elaborated by Nigel King (2012), an approach to qualitative data analysis that combines theory-driven and data-driven procedures. Chapter 5 closes with a reflection on the conceptual tools that can suitably represent the relationship detected among our data, the Weberian ideal type that I identified as the best conceptual instrument for this purpose.
