Mastering the Art of Presenting Qualitative Research Findings Effectively (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: This presentation is about writing your findings. After you have collected your qualitative data, you have to analyze, right? After analyzing, the next step that you have to think about is to present your findings. What is the best way of presenting your findings? This presentation is going to help you, give you all the tips and tricks of presenting your qualitative findings so that your audience will understand what you are communicating to them. And also, you'll be able to increase the credibility of your findings. There are three things I'm going to talk about. I'm going to show you three articles that will help you to write your findings. I'm going to also show you the sections that are needed when you are writing your findings. Lastly, I'm going to show you things that you have to think about as you are writing your findings. So these are the three things that I'm going to talk about. First, let's go to the articles. There are three articles I'm going to show you. The first one was put together by the APA Publications and Communication Board Task Force. This report gives you information about the best way of presenting your qualitative or mixed-method research. I'm going to go to the portion that talks about presenting your qualitative findings so that you can see the elements, the things that you have to think about when you are presenting your findings. They talk about the four things that you have to consider when presenting your findings. The first one is about your themes. It's very important to state your themes and provide your understanding of the themes in terms of the meaning or what the theme represents. Just like defining the theme, what does the theme represent? So that's the first thing that you have to think about. The second one is about providing step-by-step on how you analyze your data. How did you analyze the data? How did you develop codes? How did you develop themes? The next one is you have to make sure that the way that you are presenting your findings is consistent with the research approach that you used. One example is that in case you use narrative approach, you are expected that you present your findings in a narrative format. You are telling participant story in a story format. So you have to make sure that the way that you are presenting information is in line with the approach that you are choosing. The last tip that was provided is you can use illustrations. You have to make sure that the illustrations that you are using, they are meaningful, they are adding value to the information that you are communicating. They are helping your audience to better understand the information that you are sharing. So you always have to be choosy when it comes to presenting tables, diagrams, models. Try to make sure that you explain the table, you explain the diagrams that you are presenting. So these are the four things that you have to think about when you are presenting your findings. Let's go to the next article. So the next article is about Brown and Clark approach of reflexive thematic analysis. So Brown and Clark provided six steps that you have to follow when you are conducting reflexive thematic analysis. And if you want to get more information about the first five steps, I have a video on that. I'll put in the link there so that you'll be able to click on it and learn about the steps. But the final step that I want us to talk about is the issue of presenting your findings, right? Let's go to the final phase, producing the report. The place that I really want us to emphasize on is this part. So Brown and Clark recommend that you have to make sure that you are showing the connection between themes if possible, right? You are showing the connection between the themes as you are presenting your findings. They emphasize on presenting your findings in a logical way, in a way that shows the connection between them. It's very important to present your findings such a way that you are demonstrating the connection between the themes. The next one that you have to think about is you are presenting your findings in a synthesized way. One way that you can think about is when you are presenting the themes and you are using evidence from the data to support your themes, you have to present the evidence in a synthesized format. You can compare and contrast evidence as you are using those information to help you support your themes that you have. You're also showing how the evidence are related. Is this evidence adding more information to the previous evidence? Is it contradicting the other evidence that you have? And also you have to think about contextualizing your themes. In qualitative study, the context is very important. One example is that when you are presenting an evidence like quoting participant, it's very important to introduce the participant or provide a little background information before you quote participants so that your readers will put that information into context. In qualitative study, the context is very important. We cannot generalize our findings, but if you provide a context, your findings can be transferred to a similar situation. So these are the things that you have to think about. The last article that is so practical that I want to also share with you is the study about mental health. This qualitative study is so helpful because it provides you some basic information about the best way of presenting your findings. I'm going to also show you some of the elements that I see in this article. I'm going to put the links of all these articles in my description so that you can get access. So let's see the way that the findings were presented. You can see here that the authors provided step-by-step how they analyzed their data. As you can see here, their research approach was granite theory approach, and they use open coding. They use constant comparison. That's also a strategy in granite theory. If you want to compare the theory or the themes that we have developed, we want to compare that information to the new set of data so that we will make sure that the findings reflect what is in the data. They talk about how they analyze the data they use in vivo software. Another thing that they also presented is about demographics. Presentation of demographic result in a collective manner, right? You are not presenting individual demographics. You are trying to put them together. Like saying here that 36 participants were interviewed and 25 were females and 11 were males. As you can see here, the authors are presenting the demographic information in a collective way. And the table also reflects that. They did not present individual participants' demographics. They just put them together. There's a positive side and a negative side here. The negative aspect is that you may not know individual characteristics because everything has been presented in a collective manner. One reason why maybe they did that is that because the number of participants are a lot. They were 36, right? So you cannot provide each participant demographics. If you have been given a limited space to provide your findings, you may not be able to provide individual participant information. They are not like eight, they are 36. So they provided a collective information about their demographics. Then they went further and talk about the themes. And as you can see here, they provided information about their first theme, indicating to you the theme that they want to share with you. And they also provided the meaning of the theme. They explain what a theme represents. Then they went further to quote participants. But before they quote the participant, they provided background information. Who was this participant? This one is so interesting because you see here that they did not provide individual characteristics. To compensate for that, they provided information about who this participant is. When they are quoting participant, why is this one important? When it comes to qualitative study, your background, your preconceived ideas, your demographics can affect the information participant is presenting. So if you want to understand a participant, you also have to collect their demographic information. So you see how before they quoted the participant, they provided background information. Very important. That was excellent. And then after that, they gave an explanation of the quote. This is also very important because you are not giving them a lot of work to do. You are providing information that will help them to better understand the quote. You analyze the data. You chose this significant information. You chose this quote and presented. So it's your responsibility to explain to your audience what the quote is all about. I think that they did a perfect job here by explaining what the quote is all about. And then they went further to introduce another quote. But before they present a second participant, they also provided a connection. So this is where Brown and Clark was indicating that it's very important to show the connection. You cannot just quote participant and move to the second participant without making that connection. Let the information flow so that you will not confuse your readers. You want your audience to digest that information in an easier way. So it's very important for you to make that connection when you are presenting your evidence. So this is what I have for you for the three articles. I hope that you have a chance to review them so that you can learn about the techniques of presenting your findings. There is no one perfect way of presenting qualitative findings. That's why I've given you three main perspectives for you to look through and then decide the best way to communicate your findings to your audience. When you are communicating, you always have to think about audience. You are not just writing about what you found. Somebody is going to read. Who is going to read your results? Always think about the potential readers as you are writing your findings so that it can be easily consumed by your audience.