Description
Qualitative research has experienced broad acceptance in the IS discipline. Despite the merits for exploring new phenomena, qualitative methods are criticized for their subjectivity when it comes to interpretation. Therefore, research mostly emphasized the development of criteria and guidelines for good practice. I present an approach to counteract the issue of credibility and traceability in qualitative data analysis and expand the repertoire of approaches used in IS research. I draw on an existing approach from the information science discipline and adapt it to analyze coded qualitative data. The developed approach is designed to answer questions about the specific relevance of codes and aims to support the researcher in detecting hidden information in the coded material. For this reason, the paper contributes to the IS methodology with bringing new insights to current methods by enhancing them with an approach from another discipline.
How to Gauge the Relevance of Codes in Qualitative Data Analysis? - A Technique Based on Information Retrieval
Qualitative research has experienced broad acceptance in the IS discipline. Despite the merits for exploring new phenomena, qualitative methods are criticized for their subjectivity when it comes to interpretation. Therefore, research mostly emphasized the development of criteria and guidelines for good practice. I present an approach to counteract the issue of credibility and traceability in qualitative data analysis and expand the repertoire of approaches used in IS research. I draw on an existing approach from the information science discipline and adapt it to analyze coded qualitative data. The developed approach is designed to answer questions about the specific relevance of codes and aims to support the researcher in detecting hidden information in the coded material. For this reason, the paper contributes to the IS methodology with bringing new insights to current methods by enhancing them with an approach from another discipline.