ABSTRACT
Analysis in educational research involves discovering the layers of meaning in your data, which means finding the patterns in ‘what’ and ‘how’ participants describe or explain educational experiences. However, the type of data analysis will depend on the kind of data you have collected. For the purposes of this chapter we will broadly describe data as either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data is in word form – for example, interview transcripts or field notes from classroom observations. Qualitative data analysis can be daunting because there is no set way to interpret the data. The qualitative data analysis section will be split into four sections: beginning qualitative data analysis, analysis techniques derived from grounded theory, language devices for analysis, and absences in the data. The section on quantitative data analysis will also be divided into four sections: frequency, descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency and chi-square tests.
