ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how to analyse the information people gather in order to address the questions that generated their research project. It introduces the key aspects relating to qualitative data analysis and discusses data analysis for quantitative research. The chapter discusses how qualitative researchers deal with the data they collect and the careful processes that are undertaken to analyse this data. Qualitative data analysis is different from quantitative analysis in several fundamental ways. First, it does not rely on mathematics or numbers in the same way as quantitative analysis. Second, there is not the same agreement on how to perform data analysis that exists in quantitative approaches. A third major difference between qualitative and quantitative data analysis is that qualitative data analysis usually occurs simultaneously with the data-collection phase, in a continuous, cyclical process. A fourth difference between qualitative and quantitative research, already alluded to, is that qualitative researchers may use a variety of methods as the study progresses.
