How to Do IPA in MAXQDA: A Practical Workflow (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. My name is Philippe Adu. This is what I'm going to show you today. So I'm going to show you how to use MaskQDA to analyze your data if you are using interpretative phenomenological analysis. In my previous presentation, I introduced you to interpretative phenomenological analysis, which is called IPA, and I gave you seven steps that you could follow to help you to analyze your data if you are using IPA. And just for recap, IPA is part of phenomenological approach, right? So it's a type of phenomenological approach because your focus is to study the experience of participants. But it goes beyond just exploring the experience of participants. It's giving participants a chance to make sense of the experience, and then you also interpret the information participant has given you. So we call it double hermeneutic. So that is all about IPA. In terms of analyzing your data, I'm going to show you how to upload all your transcript into MaskQDA and also add demographic information if you have that, and also how to create containers for each of the participants. Why do you have to create containers for each participant? Because you want to create themes under each of the participants. You want to completely understand the experience of individual participant before you go ahead and develop overall theme, which is called master themes that cut across the experience of participant that you have, right? So I'm going to show you how to do this, and also lastly, I'm going to show you how to get your final theme. We call it master theme. So you can see here that I have my master theme here. I have one, two, three, four, five master themes addressing the research question, which is how participant makes meaning of the experience of burnout. So this is what I'm going to show you. Before I go through step-by-step how to use MaskQDA to help you to analyze your qualitative data using IPA, I want to talk about the three main strategies that you can choose from in terms of analyzing your data under IPA. So we have individualized strategy, we have collective strategy, and the last one is sequential cumulative strategy. Let's start with the individualized strategy. So the individualized strategy is the popular strategy when it comes to using IPA. It's the original way of analyzing the data, right? It's individualized because you're going to analyze each transcript, develop theme for each of the participants, right? So each participant will have their own theme, and after that, you can bring all the themes together to form the master theme. So it's individualized because you individually analyze participant information so that you get a complete understanding of each participant experience before you think about the overall experience. Collective approach is very different. Think about qualitative approach as like thematic analysis, where you go through each of the transcripts, identify information that are significant, and develop themes, right? So at the end, you have themes representing information that we have extracted from all the transcripts. Then after that, you can categorize the theme to develop the overarching theme, which is the master theme. It's collective because you first have to go through all the transcripts and develop themes, right, that represent all the experience and categorize the theme to develop overarching theme that represent the experience. And the last one is sequential cumulative strategy. It has some features of granite theory, where you first go through the first transcript, develop themes, and then as we are going through the next one, you are making adjustment to the theme so that it also represent information that you are extracting from the subsequent transcript, right? So you are always updating the themes as you are going through the process until you reach the last transcript. So that is the sequential cumulative. So which one do you have to choose? It all depends. If you have about three to six participants, then individualized is very good choice. If it's also your first time of using IPA, individualized is the one that is the best because it's the original or the classic way of analyzing data because your focus is to first understand individual unique experience before you think about overall experience. But the only limitation is that it takes a long time for you to finish. If let's say you have 20 participants, or let's say you have 15 participants, you have to analyze each of the transcripts before you go into categorizing the themes that you have developed for each of them to help you to come up with the overall theme, which is overarching theme, or we call it master theme. So that is the only limitation. But I think that if you want to really use IPA, I think this one is the best choice. But if you have a lot of participants, then I recommend using the collective one because it's just like thematic analysis where you go through all the transcripts for the first stage, you develop themes representing all the significant information that you have extracted from the data based on your understanding of the significant information. Then you can then move to the next stage where you can categorize the codes, the theme to develop overarching theme, or to develop master theme. So that is the collective one. If you have in between four to eight participants, you could also use a sequential accumulative approach. You use the theme that you identify from the first transcript to go through the process. So you continue to update the themes as you are extracting significant information through the subsequent transcript. For this presentation, we're going to focus on the first two. And then if you really understand the first two, you'll be able to do the third one if you want to do that. And if you have any questions, you can also put in the comment section. I'll be happy to address them for you. And also don't forget to subscribe to this channel. It goes a long way to help me to create good educational videos to help you and your colleagues. So thank you. So these are the three strategies. I'll be using some words or some phrases that I want to make sure that we are on the same page. So what I'm going to do here is to mention some of the phrases so that you know what I'm talking about. During the demonstration, I'll be referring or making mention of theme a lot, or themes. And for IPA, we don't really mention code. So I'll be talking about themes a lot. But there are different types of themes that I'm going to make reference to. So the first type is called emergent theme, right? If you were to do a normal thematic analysis, this one, we can call it initial quotes, right? But in IPA, we call it emergent themes. Sometimes you can also refer to it as initial theme, right? So I'll be using these words interchangeably. Sometimes I will say emergent themes. Sometimes I will say initial themes. The most important thing is that it's a theme that you do at the first stage of the coding process. And also, I'm going to also make reference to superordinate theme. I can also, so the superordinate theme is the second stage of developing themes where you read the emergent themes and then you can categorize about them. And then you come up with the superordinate theme. It can also be called overarching theme, right? And then the last phrase that I may use a lot is master theme. So the master theme, think about master theme is the last level of developing themes where if you are using individualized strategy, you'll bring all the superordinate themes together and then categorize them and then come up with their master theme, right? So it can be called overall theme. It can be called main theme, right? So these are the three main phrases that I'll be making reference to when I'm talking about themes, right? So these are the things that I'm going to talk about. Let's go ahead with the coding process using MaskQDA. But before we talk about MaskQDA, let me give you a brief information about the data I'm going to use. So the data is about burnout. And I think I've used the data a lot if you've been watching my videos. I like it because it's easy for me to use it to explain some process, do a lot of demonstrations. So that's why I like this data set. Okay. So this is the purpose of the study. And then one of the research questions that we're going to emphasize on is how participants make sense of their experience of burnout. So assuming that you have one research question, what are you going to do in terms of the analysis? And then these are their demographic data. We have five participants, and these are their ages, their gender, years of experience, and also ethnicity. So this is the data that I'm going to use. And let me show you one of the transcripts. It's a very short transcript. They start with the demographic information and also give information about the experience of burnout in terms of the causes and the solutions of burnout. And we also have demographic data sets in a cell spreadsheet. I can also show you that we may be using that information if we want to upload the demographic information into MaskQDA. So these are the things that you have to know about the data. Let's go to MaskQDA. The first step that you have to take is to double click on MaskQDA icon. So this is what you're going to see. So I will click on new here. And then you have the chance to give the name to the project. So any name that you remember, right? So burnout. So I'm going to say BO, standing for burnout. Maybe project. I'm using individualized strategy. So I just want to remember individualized. And I look for a place to save. So let me save it on the desktop now. So this is what you're going to see when you open MaskQDA. You have an option to click on this one. If you click on it, it will show you the four areas, right? So the first area here is where you see your transcript, right? This area is where you see all the codes. This is where you see the document. And this is where you see the information extracted from the data, the assets, right? You can always change the interface by clicking on this one. So the first step is to upload the transcript. How do you do that? So what you're going to do is you can click on import transcript and then choose the second option because it doesn't have a timestamp. So you click on transcript without timestamp. And then you look for the data set. This is the data set that I'm going to use. I select all of them, click on open, and then I bring all of them here. So you can see that this is participant one, all the information brought here. So the next step that I have to do is to bring demographic information. You see the demographic information Excel spreadsheet that I showed you. If you can upload this one, but if you upload it, the system will not accept it because it's not in the format that the system is consistent with what the system requires. So this is what you're going to do, right? So what you're going to do is you can go to variables and you can go to data editor for document variables. You click on that and this is what you're going to see. So as you can see here, we have to make sure that the demographic data that we have in Excel follows the formatting that we have here, right? So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to create labels for the first and the second column. So you see the document group and document name. So what I'm going to do here is let me create a new Excel spreadsheet. And then what I'm going to type here is document group, the same way that is there. So the first two columns should be document group and also document name. And then the next one will be the age, the gender. You see here the same information here, age, gender, years of experience, and then ethnicity. And then you can bring all the information here. So normally you leave the same way. There's no information here for the first document group. You don't put any information here, but here you're going to say P1, P2, P1. Then you can bring it down here to get P5, right? So you see I brought the P1 to P5. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the values and put them here, making sure that everything matches. Let me choose the first one. Okay. So you see I chose this one, the value V. I just want to make sure that everything is fine. And then I can make this one bold. So you see how I formatted it, right? I created the two columns and then brought all the demographic information. I didn't put any information here. I brought the participant ID here so that they correspond to the table that we have here, right? Now I'm going to save that. So I go to save us. I'm going to save it on the desktop and then save it participant demo. And then I can close it. And then I'm now going to import that. So you see here that I'll be able to import demographic information. Every value is here. If you are okay, we click on import and then you have all the demographic information here. There's a manual way of bringing the demographic information. If you want to know more, I have a video concerning that. I'll put the link here or here so that you can be able to get access to that if you want to know how to manually put demographic information. But it's not required for you to bring demographic information here, especially if you plan not to do further analysis comparing groups based on their demographics, right? So when you finish, you can go ahead and close it. Now we have brought our demographic information. So the next process is you see here codes. This is where you're going to create containers for your research question. I have only one research question. So I'm going to create one container for the research question. And then I can also create containers for each of the participants. I'm doing individualized strategy. So I have to develop themes for each participant before I think about developing the master theme, right? So what I'm going to do is I click on the plus here, and then you can create a container for the research question. So I can say imprinters R01 and I can call it experience of burnout. Any information that will help you to remember the research question. And then you can also bring the research question under here, code memo, and click on okay. Now I've created a container for the research question. If you have more than one research question, you can create another container, click here and then create another container for the research question. Or you can create another container called other findings. Maybe you can code any information that is not addressing the research question, but you think is important for you to code and may be useful later. You can put them in other findings, right? So you can create another container concerning that. You don't have to put anything there, but just in case you want to put some information there, right? Then the next step is to create containers for each of the participants. So we have five participants, so we're going to create five containers under the research question. So how do you do that? You click on the plus sign here corresponding to the research question, and then you type P1 or any label that you have given to the participants. I give P1 to P5 to my participant. I click on okay. I do the same thing for participant 2, 3, 4, 5. I'm going to put two kinds of themes there, the emergent themes and superordinate themes. I have to put it under each of the participants container, right? So then when you finish, you start the coding process. The first step of using IPA is to read and reread participant transcript. Why do you have to do that? You have to get overall understanding of participant experience. You have to go through and see the pieces of information that may be useful for you to do the coding and also take note of your initial interpretation, right? As you are going through it, you have to be very careful of not bringing your biases, expectations, preconceived ideas, and background into your interpretation, right? We call it bracketing, thinking about your background biases and expectation and putting them aside so that they will not overly influence how you are making sense of the data. So the first step is to read and reread and take notes. As you are reading also, you think about, okay, is this information relevant considering my research question? Can this information help me to directly or indirectly address my research question? That's what you have to do as you are going through the data, right? So you read through, and if you think it's important, you select that information, and then you can write your interpretation, right? So first thing that you have to do is make sure that you are understanding what the participant is telling you, right? So you always pause and say, what is this participant telling me, and what is my understanding of this information, and does it have any connection with the research question that I have? These are the questions you have to ask yourself as you are going through the data. As you can see here, this information is giving you how participant became interested in medicine. You can see that the participant became interested in medicine when she accompanies her mom of how she's taking care of elderly patients. That kind of observation caused her to be interested and have the passion for medicine. So you see the last part here, I love seeing the difference she made in their lives. So you can see that she really loved the positive outcome concerning the care that mom was giving. So she admired and liked the way the mom was taking care of patients, and that caused her to be interested. So this one may be important because how a person became interested in medicine may or indirectly affect how she deals with the challenges that she faces as she's providing support to her patients. So this is where you first ask yourself, do you understand what this one is telling you? And if you understand, what is your interpretation? If you want to write your interpretation based on what you see here, you can select and right click on it and go to paraphrase selection, and then put your interpretation here. So you see here that I put my interpretation right here, and then click on OK. So this is my interpretation. This arrangement is effective because as you start coding your data, you're already seeing your interpretation, so that you'll be able to develop a phrase in between two to five words representing your interpretation of the significant information you have identified. Let's go to this one. This one, participant was asked, do you experience burnout or stress at workplace? And participants said, yes. This sentence is so powerful because she did not just say, yes, I experience it. She said that, yes, many physicians do as well. So this one is showing that it doesn't happen to only her, but it's happened to many people like her in that profession. So this one is also important because it's emphasizing the collective nature of the experience. So in this case, you can select that, and then you can provide your interpretation of that experience. So I right click on the selected area, go to paraphrase section, and then I put my interpretation, emphasizing the shared professional condition. The person rapidly responded to the question, trying to show that she is not only the person experienced, is prevalent in this profession. So when you finish, you click on OK. You can see that when you go to the next one, you can right click here. You see here there's AI assets. You can use AI to help you to paraphrase, but the limitation is that AI doesn't know your research question. AI here doesn't know the previous information. It's only dependent on what you have selected. So you can use it as a suggestion, and then you can make some adjustment, but not over rely on AI. Try to interpret it yourself so that you'll be able to get rich information from the data. That's what you're going to do for the first stage. Go through, identify information that you think is significant or that may address the research question. See whether you understand what the participant is telling you, and then you can also write notes about your interpretation. This one is more about your interpretation of what the participant is giving you. This information will be useful for you as you are trying to develop themes to help you to address your research question under this participant. So that's what you're going to do. You go through and then you write your interpretation. So you can see that I selected this one. I go to paraphrase, and this is my interpretation. I click on OK. So you do that the same thing for the rest. So imagine that you're going through all of them, and then you move on to the next stage. The next stage is not to go to P2. You haven't finished with P1 yet, because remember, you have to develop emergent themes, and then you have to also develop superordinate themes first for P1 before you go to the next participant. So that's how you're going to do it, right? So let's go to the next stage. So after you've gone through the transcript, you start again, and this time you are developing themes, which is called emergent themes. So if this one is significant, you can select that. We select this one, and then you make sure that you understand what the participant is telling you and ask yourself what is your interpretation of that information, and what phrase do you want to use to represent this information. When you decide, what you could do is that you can go to participant P1 here, click on the plus sign, bring the label, right? So maybe what you have selected is about relational vocational identity, right? Because of their family members' interest, watching them taking care of patients, and that will also cause them to be interested in this profession, right? And you see the code memo here. You can write what the code represents, right? So you can say this code represents participants emphasis of how they became interested in the profession through observing what the parent was doing to patient, right? So this place is just like defining the theme that you have here. It's not really required. If the name will remind you about the meaning, you don't have to do that. But if you want to put something here so that you can go back and refer to that, you can do that here. And when you are done, you click on OK. So you can see here that I've created a container under P1, and now I'm going to select the information that I think is significant and drag and drop it into this container. You see here, what I drag and drop, this is one significant information connected to this theme. And then here shows which part is selected, right? So that's what you're going to do. The same thing that you do when you're doing thematic analysis, go through the data, identify information that is significant. But this time, you have to make sure that you understand what you are saying and also interpret all the information and see how it's addressing the research question and come up with a theme, which is emergent theme. So you see here, this one also is significant. So you can select that. And then you can even right click on it and go to new code, right? And then you can bring the code here that represent that. And then you can bring your definition of the code and then click on OK, right? So you see here that I've created a code, right? But it's here. I have to drag and drop it into P1 because you are dealing with P1. So I've shown you two ways of coding. The first way of coding is to create a container here and drag and drop. The second way is to select and right click on it and go to with new code. And then you can put the code here and then click on OK. But when you do that, it will not come under P1. You have to drag and drop that information here. So you can choose the strategy that you feel comfortable. So if you see that this one is significant, go to P1, click on the plus sign, put the code here and then click on OK. And then you can drag and drop, select and drag and drop that information under here, right? So that's how you're going to do. So the principle here is that you go through the data, identify information that is significant, make sure that you understand what the participant is saying, and then you develop a theme that represents your interpretation of what the participant is saying. And the theme can be between two to five words representing your interpretation and also addressing a research question that you have. And then you put it under that container for that participant. So that's what you're going to do. If you see something that is here, you always can check, OK, is this information, can I drop it into any of this container? If not, then you create a new container, right? So if this one is related to burnout as a collective experience, you just drag and drop that information here. If it's not related to any of them, then you create a new code or a new theme, right? So at the end of the day, you have a lot of emergent themes, right? So as you can see here, I have all my emergent themes and the participant one, right? So the next stage is to develop superordinate themes under participant P1, right? So we have to categorize all the emergent themes and then end up developing superordinate themes. How do you do that? It's the same thing as sorting, right? Grouping them based on similarities. So you're going to review each of the themes here and see whether they have something in common and see whether you can put them together. One thing that you have to do is to create containers for the superordinate themes. So you write this on the participant P1 container, and then you go to new code, right? And in particular, you can say ST. It stands for superordinate theme one, and then close it and click on OK, right? So you see here ST1. You can either right-click and go to new code, or you can just click on this plus behind participant P1, and then you go to type ST2 in parentheses and click on OK. So these are, it's like you are creating containers for the sorting to happen, right? For the grouping, right? So you can create maybe about four to five for now. You can create more, but for now you can create about four to five containers. ST5, right? So now we're going to do the sorting, right? So what we're going to do is let's start with care as inherited calling. I put in the one of the first cluster, and then physician patient identity conflict. It can also be in the first cluster, and then relational vocational. Put it here, and last one is self-neglect. So technically what I'm doing that, what do they have in common? You are grouping them based on what they have in common. I'm going to start with vocational. I think this one should be here, and then the next one could be burnout, and then I go to the next one is burnout as workload overload. So I put in the next one ST3, dual clinical administrative. I put the ST3, which is family restoring inner peace. So it looks like we are done. Let me see. We don't have anything for cluster five, so we can delete that, the ST5. So you see how we have grouped them based on similarities. Now the next step is to label the superordinates, right? So you can look at the content here, and you have to also be flexible. You can decide, okay, I think this one doesn't belong here. Let me put it in cluster two or cluster four. You can always move things around, right? So looking at the first one, if you decide on the name, you can right click here and go to properties, and then you can go here and change the name. So you see here that I've moved ST1, I've made it ST, right? You don't have to bring the numbers anymore, and then you click on save, right? Now I have the name, so let's do the second one. Looking at the content, this is the name for the cluster two. You right click that, you go to properties, and then you bring ST, burnout as shared professional endurance, and then I bring the next one, right click ST3, go to code properties, and then you put that information here, and click on okay. So the last one will be restoration through fate and relationship. So that is the label that represent that information. You can even click on this place and put that information there. So you see here that I have now my superordinate theme for participant one. You're going to do the same thing for participant two, three, four, five. The same process. Imagine that you have about 25 or 20 or 15 participants. You have to do that for each of the participants. So you see how it takes a long time for you to finish the analysis, although this is the classical way of doing it, and it's very thorough in terms of analyzing your data using IPA, right? Imagine that you have gone through each of the transcripts, and then you see here I have my superordinate theme for each of the participants, right? You see all of them here, superordinate themes. So what do you have to do next? You have to categorize to develop a master team. So how do you do that? Because you don't want to lose this information here, because what you're going to do next is to take all of these superordinate themes from each of the participants and group them as one and categorize them to develop themes, right? So this means that you may lose which one belongs to what participant from this side if you want to see it from that side here. So it's very important for you to save the project and then work on the same project so that this original information or the original outcome here will still be there. You can go back and refer to it. How do you do that? You go to home, you go to save as, save project as, and then you look for a place to save, right? So I will say individualize part two to remind me that this is what I'm going to work on, right? And then you click on okay, yes. I'm going to do that, it will open the copied project for you and then you can work on it, right? So what are we going to do? Back to the PowerPoint, we finish with emerging themes and superordinating for each of the participants. The next step is to do the master themes. But the step is a little bit different. You are not just sorting the themes that you have initially developed, right, so that you can get overall theme. It's part of sorting, but in this type, you focus first on convergent themes, themes that have things in common, themes that they don't disagree, they are similar, right? And then after you work on the convergent themes in terms of grouping them, you go to divergent themes. Why do you have to do the divergent themes later? Because it takes time for you to really explore the underlying meaning across different types of themes that they don't have similarities. So it's very important to first work on the convergent theme, themes that are similar in nature and group them before you explore the divergent theme. And I'm going to go through and for you to see what I mean by that. So what you're going to do is that now on this project, you're going to remove the superordinate themes from the corresponding participants. How do you do that? I can select the first one. I've selected all the STs and then drag it into Research Question 1. So now there's nothing here in the container. There's nothing under P1. So I'll delete P1. Go to P2, isolate, drag it and put it in Research Question 1. So what we are doing is we are compiling all the superordinate themes. You're going to do the same thing for P3. I select that and drag it and then delete the P3. I do the same thing for the last one. So now I have a list of all the superordinate themes. The next process is to categorize them, right? But as I said, focus on convergent themes first before you focus on themes that are opposite each other. They are divergent. So let's start the process. So you're going to click on the plus sign here behind the Research Question and then MT means Master Theme 1. The same way that we created that when we were doing the categorization of emergent themes. The same thing. Plus and then MT2. You can create about four or five. So technically you are creating containers so that you can group the themes that you have. MT3, MT4, MT. Okay. And you can do more if you want to, right? The most important thing is that you are grouping them based on similarities for now and then we can also take care of the ones that are a little bit different and how to group them and also the kind of label that you want to provide to them, right? So burnout as a structural overload is here. I can put it in MT. You can always choose any to put in MT1 or MT2. The most important is that they have something in common, right? Burnout from credibility and identity strain. So that can be in MT1. And then we have evolving workplace as burnout trigger. So that would be MT1. And impossible external expectation as you can see here. So as you're also going through, you can also see, okay, what kind of label do you want to give to this one, right? So one label that you could give is called burnout as external impulse and systemic. So you can right click here. And so at any time in the process, if you think that you have a name that to represent all these containers, you can always put it there. You can always go back and change if you want to. So I right click here and go to properties. And then I change this one to MT. They have things in common. So a convergent. So I can even bring C here to remind me that we are group based on similarities across them, right? And click on save, right? And then you can see whether you can group the next one, right? So at the end of the day, you are just doing the grouping based on similarities, and then you can do the last one. So that's what you're going to do. As you can see, let me show you how I did it. So you see how I have grouped all of them. Here you see MT 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I have five meta teams, but what I didn't do is to indicate which one is the convergent and which one is divergent. So the last four is convergent. So I can right click here and go to properties and bring the C here to just remind me it's not required, but remind me that they are group based on similarities across. And then this one too is convergent. So I see there all of the last four are convergent, but the first one is divergent. So you see here autonomy and mindset protecting against burnout and also knowledge as antidote to inadequacy. I think these two are divergent because the first one is like, if you have autonomy, if you have control over what you are supposed to do, control by your work, control about what the duties that you have to do, the control by the number of patients that you have to see, it's a way to prevent you against burnout. And the other way around is that if you don't have control, then because you don't have control by the number of patients that you see and also the work that you do, there's more likely for you to experience burnout. If you have knowledge about what you're doing, it can also reduce burnout. But if you have less experience and don't have much knowledge and you feel inadequate, then it can lead to burnout. So you see that it has that kind of divergent areas when you look at each of the STs, that makes you feel like you can bring them together. But when you bring it together, you ask yourself, what level should I give that connects both information? So the level that I came up with agency and autonomy as burnout protection. So this means that if you have control and you are knowledgeable about what you do, you can make decisions, independently make decisions, there's less likely for you to experience burnout. But if you don't have knowledge, if you don't have control, if you are not a person who make decisions in the workplace, and also you don't have much control by the schedule and who you see and how many people that you see, it might lead to burnout, right? So this one, I right click here, go to code properties, and then I can put D there like divergent, right? Just remind me. So this means that when you are talking about a theme, you talk about the two areas, those people that experience agency, high level of agency, and then how it's preventing them from experiencing burnout and people who experience low level of agency and autonomy and how it's leading them to burnout. So that's how you can group. So whenever you see super ordinary themes that don't have anything in common, try and go further, dig further and see what can link them together. And then when you are presenting a finding, you can also bring all these different dimensions under this theme, right? So that's how you're going to go about it. And this is how you can come up with the master theme addressing the research question. This is the individualized way of doing that. In my next video, I'm going to show you the collective way of doing that. And as I said, for the individual way, it takes a long time for you to finish, right? For the collective strategy, it doesn't take a lot of time for you to finish working on it, but the findings will be similar to the individualized one. Okay. So I will see you in my next video. Thank you so much for your time.