This excerpt comes from an email reply I gave to someone inquiring about case study data collection and how to keep the data organized. You can think of it as Rachna’s simple plan for collecting, analyzing, and writing up qualitative data: For this kind of research, you probably will be best off working in some form like this: Record all the conversations Have these transcribed Read over the transcriptions and note themes or ideas that keep showing up Link these themes to your hypotheses Make a copy of all the transcriptions Cut up one set of the transcriptions and group the strips of paper/paragraphs by hypothesis & theme Then you can use these as if they were note cards and write from them.
