1. Compare and contrast content analysis and grounded theory.

Be sure to consider
similarities/differences in aims, types of data, procedures, epistemology and
relation to qualitative approach.

People get Grounded Theory and Qualitative Content Analysis confused all the time.
Six areas of difference: background and philosophical base, unique characteristics of each
method, goals and rationale, data analysis process, outcomes of the research, and evaluation
of trustworthiness
Both have been considered equivalent approaches to interpret qualitative data (e.g.,
Priest et al., 2002). Grounded theory was treated as a research methodology, and content
analysis as a method (e.g., Crotty, 2003). Furthermore, grounded theory was considered a
theoretical framework and content analysis a research method of textual data analysis (e.g.,
Patton, 2002). Qualitative content analysis was unknown as a research method until recently,
especially in English-speaking countries, because of the dominance of quantitative content
analysis (Schreier, 2012). Novice researchers, especially students who want to conduct
qualitative research, are often confused by the characteristics of the two as result of the lack
of comparative references.
Grounded Theory 
 The proposal of grounded theory was a reaction to positivism, which followed a scientific
falsification and verification (positivism: belief that everything can be boiled down to a
mathematical proof, rationalism is all powerful).
 The conceptual orientation of grounded theory resembles that of symbolic interactionism
(Priest et al., 2002)
 Inherent in the symbolic interactionism is the position that “meaning is negotiated and
understood through interactions with others in social processes” (Starks & Trinidad, 2007, p.
1374).
 Grounded theory has two unique characteristics: constant comparative analysis and
theoretical sampling (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).
 Specifically, data collection and analysis are parallel in grounded theory, and the procedure is
neither linear nor sequential.
 Corbin and Strauss (1990) suggested the following as evaluation criteria for grounded theory:
rigor in the coding and research process, quality of concepts, systematic relatedness among
concepts, conceptual density, range of variations and specificity, significance of theoretical
findings, and theoretical sensitivity (pp. 18–19).
Qualitative Content Analysis 
 Content analysis is described as a method to classify written or oral materials into identified
categories of similar meanings (Moretti et al., 2011).
 These categories represent either explicit or inferred communication (Hsieh & Shannon,
2005).
 Because researchers can engage in data collection with or without direct contact with persons
studied, it can be an unobtrusive method.
 The quantitative approach in content analysis was criticized, however, because it often
simplified and distorted meaning as a result of breaking down text into quantifiable units in
the analytic process
 Qualitative content analysis can be referred to as “a research method for subjective
interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of
coding and identifying themes or patterns” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1278).
 First, qualitative content analysis is flexible in the use of inductive and deductive analysis of
data depending on the purpose of one’s studies (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008).
 The key difference between the two approaches centers on how initial codes or
categories are developed. An inductive approach is appropriate when prior knowledge
regarding the phenomenon under investigation is limited or fragmented (Elo & Kyngäs,
2008). In the inductive approach, codes, categories, or themes are directly drawn from the
data, whereas the deductive approach starts with preconceived codes or categories derived
from prior relevant theory, research, or literature (Cavanagh, 1997; Kondracki, Wellman, &
Amundson, 2002). The deductive approach is appropriate when the objective of the study is
to test existing theory or retest existing data in a new context.
 Second, coding in qualitative content analysis can attend to the manifest as well as the latent
content meaning of communications. Whereas manifest content means the researcher codes
the visible and surface content of text, latent content means that the researcher codes the
underlying meaning of the text (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004).
 Often the researcher wishes to reach beyond the manifest content of the text and analyze
latent content (Potter & Levine-Donnerstein, 1999). Schreier (2012) argued qualitative
content analysis is suitable for data that require some degree of interpretation.
 Mayring’s (2000) steps have provided clarification. Mayring proposed two different
procedures for qualitative content analysis according to researchers’ approaches: inductive
category development and deductive category development.

2. Consider the following statement: “Very often, coding is not only how qualitative
research is done, it is what we are studying when we do qualitative research”. Explain
what this refers to, and discuss. (Be sure to comment on Goodwin’s professional vision
paper.)
Coding is not the only way or method in the analysis of data in the qualitative
research. Some researchers used descriptive statistics- describes how or summarize the data
to highlight patterns, narrative analysis- focuses on speech and content, such as grammar,
word usage, metaphors, story themes, meanings of situations, the social, cultural and political
context of the narrative, hermeneutics analysis- focuses on the meaning of a written or oral
text. Essentially, you are trying to make sense of the object of study and bring to light some
sort of underlying coherence, and content analysis- looks at texts or series of texts and looks
for themes and meanings by looking at frequencies of words.
Coding is used in the article of Goodwin, Professional Vision. In the article, he
discusses the factors that constitute the way the people see the world to the way they do. It
transforms things seen in a specific setting into objects of knowledge that animate and create
the discourse of a profession. According to Goodwin, coding and highlighting work together
to make a relevant graphic representation, a map.
In coding, you assign a word, phrase, or number to each category. Start out with a pre-
set list of codes that you derived from your prior knowledge of the subject. For example,
"financial issues" or "community involvement" might be two codes you think of after having
done your literature review of second career teachers. You then go through all of your data in
a systematic way and "code" ideas, concepts and themes as they fit categories. You will also
develop another set of codes that emerge from reading and analyzing the data. For example,
you may see while coding your interviews, that "divorce" comes up frequently. You can add
a code for this. Coding helps you organize your data and identify patterns and commonalities.
3. Describe how one can enhance the potential validity (internal and external) of a
qualitative research project throughout the research process; that is in (a) creating a research
design; (b) analyzing your data; and (c) writing up your findings.

Internal validity is the extent to which a study establishes a trustworthy cause-and-

effect relationship between a treatment and an outcome. It also reflects that a given study
makes it possible to eliminate alternative explanations for a finding. For example, if you
implement a smoking cessation program with a group of individuals, how sure can you be
that any improvement seen in the treatment group is due to the treatment that you
administered?
Internal validity depends largely on the procedures of a study and how rigorously it is
performed.

If you are looking to improve the internal validity of a study, you will want to consider
aspects of your research design that will make it more likely that you can reject alternative
hypotheses. There are many factors that can improve internal validity.

 Blinding: Participants—and sometimes researchers—who are unaware of what

intervention they are receiving (such as by using a placebo in a medication study) to
avoid this knowledge biasing their perceptions and behaviors and thus the outcome of
the study
 Experimental manipulation: Manipulating an independent variable in a study (for
instance, giving smokers a cessation program) instead of just observing an association
without conducting any intervention (examining the relationship between exercise and
smoking behavior)
 Random selection: Choosing your participants at random or in a manner in which
they are representative of the population that you wish to study
 Randomization: Randomly assigning participants to treatment and control groups,
and ensures that there is not any systematic bias between groups
 Study protocol: Following specific procedures for the administration of treatment so
as not to introduce any effects of, for example, doing things differently with one
group of people versus another group of people.

These are the things to consider on how to enhance external validity.

 Consider psychological realism: Make sure that participants are experiencing the
events of a study as a real event by telling them a "cover story" about the aim of the
study. Otherwise, in some cases, participants might behave differently than they
would in real life if they know what to expect or know what the aim of the study is.
 Do reprocessing or calibration: Use statistical methods to adjust for problems
related to external validity. For example, if a study had uneven groups for some
characteristic (such as age), reweighting might be used.
 Replicate: Conduct the study again with different samples or in different settings to
see if you get the same results. When many studies have been conducted, meta-
analysis can also be used to determine if the effect of an independent variable is
reliable (based on examining the findings of a large number of studies on one topic).
 Try field experiments: Conduct a study outside the laboratory in a natural setting.
 Use inclusion and exclusion criteria: This will ensure that you have clearly defined
the population that you are studying in your research.
 In writing findings, you can be confident that your study is internally valid if you can rule
out alternative explanation for your findings. Avoid experimenters bias in which an
experimenter behaves differently with different groups in a study. This can be eliminated
through blinding. Identifying the threats for validity is another way. This can lead the
researcher to address the threat before it harms the design analysis of the data and findings.
Then consider the psychological realism. This means that as researcher, make sure that
participants are experiencing the events of a study as a real evaluation of events.

4. Is coding best described as (a) measurement (i.e., creating variables

for analysis), (b) analysis, or (c) a description of human information
processing? Explain.
Researchers use coding and other qualitative data analysis processes to help them make
data-driven decisions based on customer feedback. When you use coding to analyze your
customer feedback, you can quantify the common themes in customer language. This makes
it easier to accurately interpret and analyze customer satisfaction. 
Coding is best described as measurement. The need for coding is simple: “Text data are
dense data, and it takes a long time to go through them and make sense of them” (Creswell,
2015). Coding is a way of doing this, of essentially indexing or mapping data, to provide an
overview of disparate data that allows the researcher to make sense of them in relation to
their research questions. Most simply, it can be a way of tagging data that are relevant to a
particular point; you may want to, for example, identify all the places in an interview where
someone has said something relevant to question 1, rather than just looking at the answer they
gave chronologically. Richards and Richards (1994) suggest that this kind of coding (or
“code-and retrieve”) should be referred to instead as indexing, to prevent confusion with the
more analytically important coding for theory and understanding. Rapley (2011) refers to
“labels” and “labelling” instead of codes and coding.
Coding is also best described as Analysis. The majority of qualitative researchers will code
their data both during and after collection as an analytic tactic, for coding is analysis (Miles
& Huberman, 1994, p. 56). Differing perspectives, however, attest that “Coding and analysis
are not synonymous, though coding is a crucial aspect of analysis” (Basit, 2003).
And, coding is a cyclical act. Rarely is the first cycle of coding data perfectly
attempted. The second cycle (and possibly the third and fourth, and so on) of recoding further
manages, filters, highlights, and focuses the salient features of the qualitative data record for
generating categories, themes, and concepts, grasping meaning, and/or building theory.
Coffey and Atkinson (1996) propose that “coding is usually a mixture of data and data
complication, breaking the data apart in analytically relevant ways in order to lead toward
further questions about the data.
5. In any given organization, there are some qualities of individuals which are
rewarded and respected and other qualities that are not. In other words, there is an
understanding – culture – of what constitutes good performance. As a consultant, you
are charged with interviewing members of the organization and determining what that
understanding or culture is. How do you go about it?

Organizations have always had cultures, and some managers have probably always
been astute enough to figure out how to manage them, as this case illustrates.
Cultural factors play an important role in organizational performance, but there was
dearth of systematic knowledge on which to base interventions into organizational cultures.
Academic researchers found the popular treatments of culture too simplistic to match the
known complexities of organizational life.
The multiplicity of cultures to which organization members belong greatly
complicates the analysis of how cultures affect work performance. As a consultant, in order
for me to understand the culture in an organization, I will apply the holistic approach, in
which I have to immerse myself in the culture and engage in in-depth participant observation
so that I will be able to understand the culture that the organization is having. Observe every
member of the organization, observe their behavior while conversing with you, identify codes
and transform it into meaningful category.
As an interviewer during the interview, specifically I will organize a focus group
discussion, I do believe that focus-group discussion is the best way to gather an in-depth
understanding of a social issues that arising in a certain place, a company or an organization.
During the FGD, I raised them questions that will describe the company, specifically the
working environment, let them describe the boss or the supervisor, as them also the reason
why they have to work, are they prefer to work alone or with the team, how do they handle
stress, and what motivates them to stay in the company. Through this series of questions, you
will be able to discover the company culture, you will be able to understand every member of
the organization and you will know when and where are you going to reward, recognize or
correct employees for a certain behavior or act done in the organization.