Did Stephanie organise her template analysis to make best use of her data? Could she have organised
Question:
Did Stephanie organise her template analysis to make best use of her data? Could she have organised the template analysis differently?
Stephanie is a part-time student conducting a masters in management at a UK university.
Stephanie’s research project is focused upon how organisations can make their office spaces more environmentally friendly, and what are the barriers to that process. As a committed green activist, Stephanie has relished the chance to investigate this issue in two separate international locations. One of these is her own organisation, which is a branch of a large multinational bank, and the other is in a New Zealand government office where she had the opportunity to interview staff when she was in Wellington on vacation. Stephanie decided she wanted to do two comparative case studies of how the different organisations approached environmental issues so her data comes from a range of different sources. She has interviewed and audiorecorded 10 employees at each of the different locations about their views and transcribed these interviews. She has also collected documents that relate to the different company policies and practices regarding environmental issues. Furthermore she has spent a week conducting participant observation in both offices on the everyday practices around recycling and other environmentally friendly practices. As part of this she has made extensive field notes in her research diary.
This is the first time that Stephanie has conducted any qualitative data analysis and she is concerned to find an appropriate method that will enable her to draw upon the three different sources of data she has across the two case studies. Initially it all seemed a bit bewildering and she was unsure where to start. In her research methods lectures her tutor had talked about three different types of qualitative data analysis as examples of the variety of data analytic processes available. These were content analysis, narrative analysis and thematic analysis using templates, but Stephanie was unsure about which of these would be appropriate in her case.
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