Top 5 qualitative blog posts from 2020
With over 150 articles and counting, our blog is a fantastic resource for learning qualitative methods, analysis and software tools like Quirkos, and is read by hundreds of thousands of people a year.
It’s been a strange one, but there’s no excuse for missing end of year traditions, such as the electrifying countdown of the top qualitative blog posts of the year! With over 150 articles and counting, our blog is a fantastic resource for learning qualitative methods, analysis and software tools like Quirkos, and is read by hundreds of thousands of people a year. This also makes it a bit of a chore to flip through, so without further ado, let’s start with the top 5.
Designing a semi-structured interview guide
Showing the popularity of interviews as a qualitative method, this blog post has always been one of our most popular. I think it helps because it goes into detail into writing an interview guide (and actually what should be in it), something that a lot of research articles and textbooks don’t cover. A good one to bookmark!
Reaching saturation point in qualitative research
A big anxiety for new qualitative researchers is sample sizes, and knowing when there is enough data. It’s also a common query for people with mixed-method or quantitative supervisors or reviewers, who want justification for why they’ve collected data from seemingly few people. This guide is a no-nonsense overview of saturation, only one of many ways to set a data collection size, but as this article shows, an ever popular one.
Open and Axial Coding using Qualitative Software
*New Entry!*
It’s a commonly used analytic approach, but there are lots of different interpretations which this article helps users work through. It’s also not always clear how to map these stages into a qualitative software approach, and the post outlines some good ways to do this on any software, not just Quirkos. A big hit for readers this year!
Tips for conducting online interviews and focus groups for qualitative research
*New Entry!*
Not really much of a surprise this year, but this article looking at the pros-and-cons of different tools for collecting qualitative data online has been a big hit, especially in the first half of the year. It talks about some of the pitfalls of common tools like Zoom and Skype, especially the privacy and confidentiality issues. It’s something a lot of Twitter conversations have been raising recently, as IRBs and ethics panels catch up with an increasingly online data collection paradigm.
Beginners guide to qualitative coding
It’s only a year old, but this YouTube tutorial already has more than 100,000 views! It’s not too long, but packed with a clear summary, visual metaphors and a quick overview of some of the popular coding types. It’s a good one to bookmark and share, but also don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel which has snappy guides like this one, as well as Quirkos tutorials and monthly live webinars.
Thanks to all our readers for engaging with our blog this year, and don’t forget to give Quirkos a try for your qualitative analysis. It’s not only the simplest tool, but also the most affordable, and we are humbled by how important Quirkos Cloud and the remote collaboration and team work has become to hundreds of qualitative researchers this year. We think our honest pricing (with no hidden extras for sharing or other features) and simplicity of use has helped us stand out this year, and we have lots more exciting developments to share in the new year. Watch this space, and give the free trial a spin!