Structured, Qualitative Comparison

This article defines qualitative data as representations of human acts and utterances, conventionally analysed in the form of long, coherent texts. The purpose of qualitative research is to interpret the actors' understandings and intentions.On the background of this definition, I make a distinction between variable-coding and theme-coding and between code-oriented and content-oriented analysis. Variable-coding of the text-content should be avoided, since this implies reducing multi-dimensional qualitative data to single-dimensional data. However, variable-coding of background-information can be used together with theme-coding of the text-content without corrupting the qualitative data. I call this approach ‘structured, qualitative comparison’. In that way it is possible to retain the many levels of meaning of qualitative data throughout the research-process, while focusing on the importance of macro-variables or scope-conditions, which indicate the potential area of validity of the findings.By examples from a comparison of Norwegian and German factories, I demonstrate the usefulness of such a content-oriented analysis-style for qualitative research, as well as for combining qualitative and quantitative data. In this way, the basic characteristics of qualitative data are preserved throughout the research-process.

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