I'm buried in interviews, archival material or other text
Get an overview of everything you have, build a simple catalogue, and analyse with your question in front of you.
In short
Start here, today. Open a spreadsheet and list every item you have, one per row: each interview, document, box or file. Add a date, a source, the length or page count, and a column called “first impression”. Don't read anything closely yet; aim to get through as many items as you can. This takes about 30 minutes.
After that, work through these steps. Choose one to jump to it.
Step by step
Tick each step as you finish it. Open a step for the how.
0 of 6 steps done
Get the overview first
Skim everything once, quickly, before any detailed analysis. You're looking for the shape of the collection: which sources are rich and which are thin, what recurs, what's missing, and which items seem central. For interviews, listening back to a few recordings at higher speed can help; for archives, start from finding aids, indexes and your own photo logs.
Build a catalogue you'll keep
Turn your list into a working catalogue with stable IDs (P01, P02, or archive, box, folder and item), key details and a status column. For archival work, record full citation details for every item now, because finding a document again later is painful and sometimes impossible. Use the same IDs in your file names and notes.
Write short memos as you go
For each item or batch, write a few lines: what it's about, what struck you, how it connects to your question, and any passage worth returning to. Memos are where analysis starts. They also let you hold the whole collection in mind without rereading everything.
Choose a coding approach on purpose
Decide whether your codes will come from your framework and the literature, emerge from the material, or both. Try the approach on three or four varied items, refine it, then apply it more widely. Historians often organise by chronology, actor or theme rather than formal coding, and the same principle holds: test the scheme on a sample before committing. Software such as NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA or Taguette helps with large collections, but a spreadsheet works for smaller ones, and your discipline's methods literature should shape the approach more than the software does.
Keep the question in front of you
Write your research question at the top of every analysis document. When something fascinating turns up, ask whether it helps answer that question. If it doesn't, put it in a “later” file and move on; that file is often where a future paper comes from.
Accept that you won't use everything
Much of your material will shape your understanding without ever being quoted, and that is how this kind of research works. It doesn't waste anyone's time. Choose the material that shows your argument best, and explain in your methods section how you selected it.
Words you can use
Is this you? Signs to look for
- You have piles of transcripts, document photographs or field notes, and you've read only some of them closely.
- Every time you open the material you find something interesting, follow it, and lose the day.
- You've started coding twice and abandoned it both times.
- You feel that leaving anything out would waste participants' time or miss the thing that matters.
Why this happens
Qualitative and archival projects produce material faster than anyone can analyse it. A single interview can run to dozens of pages of transcript, and a few weeks in an archive can leave you with thousands of photographs. Almost all of it is interesting, which is exactly the problem: without a clear question in front of you, reading turns into wandering.
The usual mistake is to begin detailed coding on page one of the first file, before you know what the whole collection looks like. The scheme keeps changing, early files need recoding, and the work starts to feel endless. A rough overview first, plus accepting from the start that much of the material will inform you without appearing in the thesis, makes the task finite.
Worth a look (4)
- PatterPat Thomson writes often about qualitative analysis and turning material into argument.
- Writing for Social Scientists, by Howard BeckerUseful on moving from a mass of material to a clear argument.
- Sage Research MethodsBooks, case studies, videos and practice data sets on research methods, from interviews to regression. Your library usually provides access.
- PRISMAThe reporting guideline for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, with the checklist, flow diagram templates and extensions for scoping and other reviews. Many journals expect you to follow it.
When to bring someone in
Your supervisor, or a committee member with qualitative or historical expertise, can tell you whether your approach fits what your discipline expects. Libraries often run workshops on qualitative analysis software, and archivists are usually glad to explain how a collection is organised. A peer analysis group, where people bring a few pages of data to discuss, makes this work much less lonely.
Find the right person, or talk to Ify