Presenting Qualitative Research

Presenting Qualitative Research

When presenting the results of research, the objective is communication and so the presentation should be tailored to suit the audience. Whatever the audience or the form of the presentation, a good starting point is the research question. If you are clear what question you set out to address, it will be easier to make sense of the mountains of data you have generated and to present an interesting, meaningful and high quality paper or other presentation. Your analysis will probably have generated a number of themes or categories and you might have interpreted these in such a way as to contribute to the theory base in your discipline. The story of how you undertook this analytical process forms the basis of your presentation. A good way to structure the results section of a research report is to use, as subheadings, the main categories or themes which emerged from the data.

The thematic structure can be set out at the beginning, either as a list or in diagrammatic form. The overarching themes may be presented as sections with the contributory categories as sub sections. In this way, you can show how the categories of data are used to construct a case that the overarching themes are the main findings of the study. Further “evidence” to support the findings is usually provided by using direct quotations from respondents. Key quotations should be selected to illustrate the meaning of the data, care being taken not to rely heavily on a small number of particularly articulate sources. Consider the example below. It shows three overarching themes and the structure of sub-categories which emerged from an investigation into the need for an outreach teenage health clinic. 

The research question was “What do young people find difficult in their use of primary care services?”

1)    Health issues for young people

i)      Sexual health

(a)  safe sex

(b)  pregnancy

(c)  sexual behaviour

(d)  sexual orientation

ii)    Drugs      

(a)  smoking

(b)  alcohol

(c)  illicit drugs

iii)   Mental health     

(a)  mental health problems

(b)  relationships

(c)  self esteem

(d)  stress

2)    Barriers to accessing services

i)      Lack of knowledge

(a)  services available

(b)  understanding

(c)  perceptions

ii)    Attitudes

(a)  own beliefs                                                                                

(b)  peer pressure

(c)  expectations of staff

3)    Incentives to use services

i)      Availability

(a)  time

(b)  venue

ii)    Approachability

(a)  staff attributes

(b)  environment

A presentation of these findings would describe what was meant by “health issues” in general for the young people interviewed. This would be followed by identification and description of each of the broad categories of health issue - sexual health, drugs and mental health. Each category of health issue describes how a range of topics is included in this category (labeled (a), (b), ...).  Quotations extracted from the transcripts of interviews with young people should be used to illustrate why or how this is a health issue.

  

Quotations should be presented with a linking commentary and should be selected to illustrate such features as: the strength of opinion or belief, similarities between respondents, differences between respondents, the breadth of ideas.

As the researcher works through the different categories, links should be made between categories to demonstrate how the themes emerged and how conclusions about the findings were drawn. Many of the quotations will “speak for themselves” as they are examples of the manifest level of analysis - what people actually said. However, as previously mentioned in Section 6, analysis of data also includes interpretation which involves extracting the meaning of what was said and using it to comment on and contribute to the theory base.

Strategies which contribute to the rigor of a piece of research and any report of it are transparency and reflexivity. A researcher should make clear and justify the method used as well as the analytical process as described above. Some forms of reporting call for sections exclusively about the researchers’ roles in the research but when this is not the case, the style and content of the report should make apparent their roles and acknowledge the possible influence they will have had on the research process.

Some qualitative data can be dealt with in a quantitative way. If an idea appears in the data frequently, it may be feasible to count how often it appears. In the example of the teenage outreach service, it may be possible to say what percentage of respondents identified sexual health as a health issue, what percentage identified drugs and what percentage identified mental health. By counting the number of respondents who mention contraception as opposed to the number who mention safe sex it may appear that contraception is a greater concern than safe sex for young people. It may be feasible or even desirable to present some of the results quantitatively using tables and figures. It must be made clear however that these figures do not represent a statistical sample.