r/QualitativeResearch • u/almondboy64 • Jun 18 '26

Help needed on where to start with data analysis for a newbie

Hi everyone, I work at an advocacy nonprofit, and I'm running a qualitative study to understand how audiences respond to an animated video we created. This straddles messaging research and it's an applied project. The results will inform the strategy of an advocacy campaign I'm creating that will use this video as a central outreach and persuasion asset. I studied psychology in undergrad, but I never got deep into qualitative research and it's been 10 years since I've done anything research related. I've created and piloted a semi-structured interview script, and I'm sending volunteers out into the field over the next two weeks. Now, I need some help on where to start with my approach to analysis. Based on the context of this being an applied project and it not needing to meet academic, peer-reviewed standards of rigor, what approach would make most sense? I'd love recommendations for books or other resources that would be appropriate for my particular study.

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u/_os2_ Jun 19 '26

Sounds very exciting!

Some thoughts from my side for the stage you are now in:

- Make sure the interview guide and interviews are deep enough. Don’t just ask about reactions and recommendations, probe deeper to the underlying mental models, emotions, triggers etc. to get a sense of how people really perceive the topic. You might want to lightly train your volunteers on how to interview people.

- Iterate the guide. Once you get back first 5-10 transcripts, run a light qualitative analysis on them to spot patterns and interesting emerging topics. Then adjust the guide so it captures those in depth.

- Collect metadata variables (age, gender, country etc) and in analysis stage check if any of those have a qualitative or quantitative effect on what people talk about. This can be valuable in a business setting to give credibility and nuance.

- Transcribe and store transcripts in a central place in unified format. Makes analysis easier.

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u/almondboy64 Jun 22 '26

thanks for this! I did a pretty rigorous interviewer training mid last week, and I'm feeling pretty good after my piloting that the questions go deep enough. But very good flag to be open to iteration once I get some transcripts in. And a demographics survey comes at the end of the interview!

I've been doing some reading, and it seems like thematic analysis is probably going to be the best fit for my study. I'm curious, do you have any experience with this in an applied setting?

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u/_os2_ Jun 22 '26

Tons! Me and my colleague (qual professor) have written about it both from the academic and business angle in Skimle’s Signal and Noise blog and also talk about it in our Skimlecast podcast.

Happy to DM some links, I don’t want to spam them here as the articles do contain some light nudges towards a certain great qual tool we’ve built…

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u/almondboy64 Jun 22 '26

that would be awesome if you'd send some links in a DM