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Welcome to the Big Qual Analysis Resource Hub

On this website you can find a wide range of materials designed to help researchers think about, handle and analyse large volumes of complex qualitative and qualitative longitudinal data, including working with multiple archived data sets.

The hub is the outcome of an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods research project ‘Working across qualitative longitudinal studies: A feasibility study looking at care and intimacy’. The study examined the possibilities for developing new procedures and extending good practice for working across multiple sets of archived qualitative data. We wanted to know whether it is possible to do ‘big qual’ analysis while retaining all that is distinct about rigorous qualitative research.

The resources have been developed, produced and/or gathered by Professor Rosalind Edwards and Dr Susie Weller from the University of Southampton, and Professor Lynn Jamieson and Dr Emma Davidson from the University of Edinburgh. We have included papers, guest blogs from international experts, audio podcasts, teaching resources, as well as more detailed information about the project and our novel breath-and-depth method for big qual analysis that combines new computational techniques for analysing the breadth of large volumes of qualitative data, with more conventional methods of qualitative analysis that emphasise depth.

Post#28: Prof Lynn Jamieson, Dr Emma Davidson, Prof Rosalind Edwards and Dr Susie Weller: COVID-19 and ‘Big Qual’

Today’s post is written by Prof Lynn Jamieson along with Dr Emma Davidson (University of Edinburgh) and Prof Rosalind Edwards and Dr Susie Weller (University of Southampton). The blog discusses the potential of qualitative secondary analysis, and in particular ‘big qual’ analysis, for helping to overcome the restrictions placed on qualitative work during the global …

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Post#27: Dr Emma Davidson, Justin Chun-ting Ho and Prof Lynn Jamieson: Computational text analysis using R in Big Qual data: lessons from a feasibility study looking at care and intimacy

Today’s post is written by Dr Emma Davidson, and her colleagues Justin Chun-ting Ho and Professor Lynn Jamieson in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. The blog considers the potentials and pitfalls of using R, a tool for computational text analysis, to get an overview of a large volume of qualitative data and to identify areas of salience …

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Post#26: Dr Susie Weller: Collaborating with original research teams: Some reflections on good secondary analytic practice

In this blog, Dr Susie Weller, Senior Research Fellow at the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton reflects on her experiences of thinking about good practice in qualitative secondary analysis. Susie draws on a recent ESRC National Centre for Research Methods study – Working across qualitative …

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Post#25: Dr Susie Weller, Prof Rosalind Edwards, Prof Lynn Jamieson and Dr Emma Davidson: Selecting data sets to create new assemblages

The focus of today’s blog is on the process of identifying qualitative material from multiple archived data sets to bring together to conduct secondary analysis. This process is the first stage in a four-step breath-and-depth method we developed for analysing large volumes of qualitative data. We draw on our experiences of conducting the ESRC National …

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