Speaker 1: In comments to one of my recent videos one of you asked me to explain how to present qualitative findings. So in this video I'll talk about this topic and I decided to divide this video into two sections because I wasn't sure what exactly you mean when you asked how to present, how to discuss qualitative findings. So in the first section I will briefly talk about visual representations how to visually lay out our findings from a qualitative study and in the second section I will focus on how do we discuss these findings and on the order in which we present the findings so this will include how do we how do we divide our findings do we discuss them by for example a method of data collection or by the themes that we developed or maybe by groups of participants that we have in our study. So firstly the question of how to visualize the findings, how to present them visually. So here there is no clear-cut answer because it will really depend on on what you want to present and also on your study, what the aim of the study was and what kind of findings you gathered in your study. In general I'm a big fan of presenting qualitative findings in a format of a table a table of themes so you have a table in which you list all your themes and list how many times they appeared and also in how many sources and how many interviews for example if you had interviews in your study this is a very clear way to represent your themes it's very practical it shows the reader straightaway the whole thematic framework and later you can if you have individual sections that discuss these themes you can also break that table down into smaller sections of that table so for example if you have a theme of challenges of online education and and benefits of online education as you go into the section on challenges and benefits you can take sections from that main table themes that you present at the beginning of your chapter and then just present the small section the small table that only lists the benefits or only list the challenges of online education if that was the topic of your study and two additional considerations with regard to a table of themes are one should we should we cite should we provide these numbers that i mentioned so how many times the theme was discussed in how many interviews. That's the first question. Some people do not like the idea of presenting these numbers arguing that what you do when you present such numbers is quantifying qualitative data. So you're turning qualitative data into numbers so you're making it look like it's quantitative data in fact. Despite this criticism there are still many qualitative researchers and authors who still prefer this way, who still argue that it is beneficial to cite these numbers. And I'm one of these people. I definitely like to give these numbers because without these numbers, you don't really know how strong a given theme was. So if you think about it, if you have a theme or topic that was only discussed by one participant, as opposed to a theme that was discussed by let's say 19 out of 20. Of course it's good to show the reader how many times this theme was discussed to make our argument, to build our argument for how strong the theme was or maybe for the fact that we decided to include it as one of the main themes in our study. So I definitely like to give these numbers. And the second question that I was asked recently is whether you should in that table of themes whether you should have a column in which you provide example extracts for each theme and again this this depends on individual perspective and approach but i do not i do not like to to give such example extracts in a table for several reasons the main reason is that it simply makes the table very long and difficult to read and the second reason is that in order to provide these extracts you have to of course be very selective and you have to decide which extracts to include in that table and to me when doing so there is a risk that you will simply not communicate what this theme was about so somebody may get a wrong idea about this theme if all they have at least initially at the beginning of the chapter is that table and just one or two extracts without any context or any explanation. So I don't like doing that. I prefer to omit this information, not to give these example extracts in the table but then as I go through my chapter, as I discuss these themes, I like to explain what they were about and of course use a lot of quotes and extracts from my from my data and in addition to the table of themes you can of course include some other visualizations so you may include some word clouds or or models and diagrams you can include charts and this will really depend on on what you like and what you want to include and also on what kind of study you were conducting because sometimes it simply makes sense if you're conducting an exploratory study of some kind of a process for example it's of course good to demonstrate that process through a diagram a model of certain relationships how something was likely to influence as one theme was likely to influence the other theme and so on and so forth so so obviously it just makes sense to present this kind of a dynamic model dynamic relationship in addition to your table of themes because i i would argue that it's always good to have this table of themes first the table that i discussed but also sometimes there are studies where it doesn't seem to make sense to have these these diagrams or models because simply you're not interested in speculating about relationships you're to use an example I gave you if you're conducting a study of the participants opinions about certain challenges and benefits of something so in our example of online education you may not necessarily be interested in any kind of relationships you don't even want to hypothesize about such relationships so why would you need a model but then on the other hand some people like visual representations and they they can still put all these themes in some kind of a static model that nicely represents the themes that you found in your data so like I said it really depends on you but it is my opinion that is always whether you choose to supplement this information with some kind of a diagram or chart it's always good to have a clear table of themes from your data so now let's move on to the more important in my opinion part of this video so how do you present how do you discuss the findings of your study and here again I wonder it won't really help you to know that as many other things as many other aspects of research of qualitative research this will really depend on on many factors and most importantly on your approach on what you decide is important so here I'll go through several approaches several possible approaches to presenting your findings discussing your findings and then at the end i will explain how to select the right approach and and what factors to consider when making that decision so let's work on our example that i provided before so let's imagine we have a study we have conducted a study of of participants opinions about benefits and challenges of online education and in our study we had two groups of participants we had teachers and we have we had students so how do we present our findings here i suggest that we have a couple of possibilities so the first possibility is to present the findings by the main themes so in our case let's say the main themes were benefits and challenges of online education because these reflect our research questions so our research questions were of course something like what are the perceptions of benefits and challenges of online education by students and by teachers so when developing our findings chapter or findings and discussion whatever you prefer whatever format you prefer we can organize the chapter into these main themes so we can start with for example the chapter on benefits of online education or section about benefits of online education followed by a chapter or section on challenges of online education and without and within each of these sections or chapters we can then divide introduce additional sections or subsections so these will be our students and teachers so So we have our benefits of online education chapter, within that chapter we have the findings from the student interviews or student data, and then we have a section on teacher data. So we first go through all the benefits and discuss and describe these benefits as told or believed and expressed by our teachers, and then we move on to our students. then we can have another section where we kind of compare these findings a little bit more and maybe highlight some main similarities and differences between the groups this will be optional because you can also start with the students and then as you have discussed the student findings and you're going through the teacher findings you can also always make references back to the previously discussed findings of the other group but i do think it's also it's always nice to to have a section where you combine these and discuss these findings together so if your first chapter was about benefits of online education and then you went through the benefits as expressed by the teachers and the students your next chapter will be about challenges of online education and then again within that chapter you'll do the same classification so you'll start with students and follow it by by teachers or the other way around but the whole point is that you have clear chapters organized reflecting your main themes and within these chapters you separate the findings into your different group groups of participants but then you may decide to follow another approach so maybe you want to divide the chapters by your groups of participants so in this case you would have a chapter about let's say student data student findings in that chapter you'll have sections about students opinions about benefits and students opinions about challenges of online education and after that you will have a chapter on teacher findings and within that chapter you will have sections on benefits as expressed by the teachers and then benefits as expressed and then challenges as expressed also by the teachers so unlike in our first approach where we developed our chapters based on our main themes here we developed our chapters based on our groups of participants and within within each chapter we discuss the main themes and then again ideally it would be nice to have another chapter in which you combine student and teacher data and discuss certain similarities and differences but now to make things a little bit more complex so hold tight because it will become more and more confusing imagine that we have also different methods of data collection in our study so we conducted interviews with these both both groups but also we had we distributed a questionnaire asking about these benefits and challenges and also again we distributed that questionnaire among these different groups so teachers and students so here a couple of new possibilities arise so how do we organize this kind of findings we can so the first approach we can organize the findings by the method because now we have two different methods so we can have a separate chapter on interviews, interview findings and a separate chapter on questionnaire findings and within each chapter again we'll have to make a decision so this is where the things get quite complex because within the interview chapter we again have to decide do we do we discuss the interviews by the group or by the theme so so it will either be the interview chapter and then it will be a section on benefits for example and then we'll go through benefits as discussed by by the teachers and the students and then we'll have our next section on challenges and then we'll go through both groups again or we can have the interview chapter the interview findings chapter and then divided by the groups so again so student interviews and then go through both benefits and challenges and then teacher interviews and go through benefits and challenges and after that we would have our questionnaire findings chapter and then again we have to make the same decision do we follow the structure based on on the main theme or do we follow the structure the structure based on our our research participants but then to make things even more complex when we have these different methods of data collection we don't have to divide the chapters by the method of data collection we can still divide the chapters either by the theme or by the group of participants so for example we can have a student chapter and within it we can either divide it into student questionnaire findings and student interview findings or we can divide it into the themes so so benefits and challenges and within each of these sections we can kind of discuss both data sets so for example we can focus mainly on the interview findings and supplement these findings with our questionnaire data and then we'll repeat the process for the teacher's data so we'll have a teacher's chapter and then just repeat what I just said about the student chapter but we can also still even if we have more methods of data collection we can also divide the chapters by the themes so again we can have the benefits chapter and the challenges chapters chapters separately and then within the benefits chapter we can we can decide whether we want to divide it into student data and teacher data and then and then discuss these different groups or we can divide it into interview findings and questionnaire findings and then within these sections we can discuss for example within the interview findings we can discuss the student interviews and straight away compare that to the teacher interviews so as you can see there are so many different possibilities for how to present your findings so how do how do you decide which one is the right one for your study of course as I said in this video and as I said many times before there is hardly ever the right way especially in qualitative research because all of these are are correct ways of presenting findings so you will have to make a decision for what suits your study also you will have to decide which one you're the most you feel the most confident following which approach so it will really depend on your preferences but also on your study and what kind of narration you want to build around your findings so if it's very important for you for example to highlight the differences between the two different groups it may make more sense to focus on developing on dividing your chapters into groups into student and teacher data to make it very clear and focus on on each of these groups separately before having a chapter in which you discuss the findings together but maybe you really want to put your themes in the foreground and you really want to focus on the themes on the benefits and challenges this you believe this is the most important part of your study so you wanted to be very clear what kind of themes emerged this could also be more suitable if for example there was more consistency between the different groups so you have a very similar you have two very similar thematic frameworks for each of these groups perhaps it would also make a little bit more sense to divide these into themes because if you have quite different themes of course it may be a little bit more messy because you may have more to say on one of these themes and less to say on the other of these themes so so this will also contribute to your decision your personal opinion and your personal judgment so you have to think do I have enough data to put in that chapter to make a separate chapter and will this chapter be comparable to the other chapter so again this is so for example if you have different methods of data collection and you have plenty of data on interview from the interviews but you don't really have that much from the questioners perhaps it's not the best idea to have a separate interview and questionnaire chapters because your interview chapter will be very long and very detailed and your questionnaire chapter will not necessarily be so long so in that case it's probably better to or to choose a different way to so to follow the classification that I mentioned by by the group by the group of participants or maybe by the themes because you can kind of hide some limitations of your questionnaire this way because you can focus on discussing the main data from the interviews and just supplement it with the questionnaire data. So when you talk about the themes for example and you say that in the interview most of the participants said that the main benefit of online education is that it's convenient and then you may say that this was reflected in the questionnaire where 90% of the respondent respondents selected convenience as the main benefit so you're just using your questionnaire findings to supplement your main findings and this way you don't really you don't the reader doesn't understand doesn't necessarily know that perhaps your questionnaire findings were a little bit more limited to your main interview findings so as I said this will really depend and the first thing the most important thing that you have to do is to try to plan that chapter first look at your data and try to think what would be the best way to present the findings which one would be the clearest way which one would show your main findings which one would reflect what you believe is the most important thing about your findings so again as I said is it the difference between the responses across the different data collection methods or is it the difference between the two groups and you really want to talk about the two groups and highlight how different they were or how similar they were or maybe you want to focus on consistency and how consistent they were and and you had as I said again these two main themes and you really want them to to dominate to be in the center of your presentation of findings so you'll have to make the decision yourself I hope that you enjoyed the video and you learned something new from it if you did please like the video to help it get found on YouTube and if you if you're new to this channel consider subscribing Thank you.