ABSTRACT
Using the more common resource of interview transcripts, most modern qualitative data analysis approaches use this basic method of theme extraction in some form or another. Therefore, it is not possible to give any kind of fixed recipe for the analysis of qualitative data. It is not possible to give the way to analyse qualitative data because a variety of approaches exists, each with different operating principles and philosophy. The conventional concepts of reliability and validity will still apply where qualitative data have been content-analysed then treated in a quantitative manner. For most of the last century, however, there was (and still is) a tradition of taking initially qualitative data (such as political speeches, television advertisements, reported contents of dreams, participants descriptions of ambiguous pictures, etc.) and subjecting these data to a categorisation and coding procedure, which created quantitative data.
