Q4/W4

SHS

Practical Research 1

Quarter 4
Learning Activity Sheet 10
DRAWING OUT PATTERNS AND
THEMES, CONCLUSION FROM DATA

Negros Occidental High School

Government Property
NOT FOR SALE
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PRACTICAL RESEARCH 1
Learning Activity Sheet No. 10
Second Edition, 2023

Published in the Philippines

By the Department of Education
Division of Negros Occidental
Negros Occidental High School

Republic Act 8293, section 176 states that: No copyright shall

subsist in any work of the Government of the Philippines. However, prior
approval of the government agency or office wherein the work is created
shall be necessary for exploitation of such work for profit. Such an agency
or office may, among other things, impose as a condition the payment of
royalties.

This Learning Activity Sheet is developed by Negros Occidental

High School, Division of Negros Occidental adopted to Senior High School
Practical Research 1 Learning Toolkit, First Edition, August 2020 from
Division of Negros Occidental

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this learning resource may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or
mechanical without written permission from Negros Occidental High
School, Division of Negros Occidental.

Development and Enhancement Team of

Practical Research 1 Leaning Activity Sheet
Negros Occidental High School
Senior High School

Writer/Developer/Enhancer: Auggie M. Torrecampo

Cover Page Designer: Deyru J. Morancil

Quality Assurance Team: Auggie M. Torrecampo

Janice David
Rogie Bacosa

School Management Team: Donna Bella O. Aposaga

Asst. Principal II for Academics – SHS

Josette S. Terrora
2 IV
Principal
Introductory Message

Welcome to Practical Research 1!

The Learning Activity Sheet is a product of the collaborative efforts

of the Schools Division of Negros Occidental through the Curriculum
Instruction Division (CID). This is developed to guide the learning
facilitators (teachers, parents and responsible adults) in helping the
learners meet the standards set by the K to 12 Basic Education
Curriculum.
The Learning Activity Sheet is self-directed instructional materials
aimed to guide the learners in accomplishing activities at their own pace
and time using the contextualized resources in the community. This will
also assist the learners in acquiring the lifelong learning skills, knowledge
and attitudes for productivity and employment.

For the learning facilitator:

The Practical Research 1 Learning Activity Sheet will help you
facilitate the leaching-learning activities specified in the Curriculum Guide
of the Department of Education with minimal or no face-to-face encounter
between you and learner. This will be made available to the learners with
the references/links to ease the independent learning.

For the learner:

The Practical Research Learning Activity Sheet is developed to
help you continue learning even if you are not in school. This learning
material provides you with meaningful and engaging activities for
independent learning. Being an active learner, carefully read and
understand the instructions then perform the activities and answer the
assessments. This will be returned to your facilitator on the agreed
schedule.

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 LEARNING ACTIVITY SHEET 10
DRAWING OUT PATTERNS AND THEMES, CONCLUSION FROM DATA

I. Learning Competency:
 infers and explain patterns and themes from data: CS_RS11-IVd-f-2
 relates the findings with pertinent literature: CS_RS11-IVd-f-3
 draws conclusions from patterns and themes: CS_RS11-IVg-j-1

II. Background Information of Learners

Drawing out Patterns and Themes from Data

It’s important that you properly analyze your interviews, but there
is no single right way to perform qualitative data analysis, and the method
you choose primarily depends on the actual purpose of your study. Here,
we will focus on one of the most common methods for analyzing semi-
structured interviews: Thematic analysis.
A thematic analysis strives to identify patterns of themes in the
interview data. One of the advantages of thematic analysis is that it’s a
flexible method which you can use both for explorative studies, where you
don’t have a clear idea of what patterns you are searching for, as well as
for more deductive studies, where you know exactly what you are
interested in. An example of an explorative study could be conducting
interviews in a technical workplace in order to obtain an understanding of
the technicians’ everyday work lives, what motivates them, etc. A more
deductive study could be conducting interviews in a technical workplace in
order to find out how technicians use a specific technology in order to
handle safety-critical situations.
No matter which types of study you are doing and for what purpose,
the most important thing in your analysis is that you respect the data and
try to represent your interview as honestly as possible. When you share
your results with others, you should be transparent about everything in
your research process, from how you recruited participants to how you
performed the analysis. This will make it easier for people to trust in the
validity of your results. People who don’t agree with your conclusion might
be critical of your research results, but if you know that you have done
everything possible to represent your participants and your research
process honestly, you should have no problem defending your results.

Steps in a Thematic Analysis

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 “Analysis involves a constant moving back and forward between the
entire data set, the coded extracts of data that you are analyzing, and the
analysis of the data that you are producing.”

—Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Authors and qualitative researchers

in psychology.
Thematic analysis describes an iterative process as to how to go
from messy data to a map of the most important themes in the data. The
process contains six steps:
a. Familiarize yourself with your data.
b. Assign preliminary codes to your data in order to describe the
content.
c. Search for patterns or themes in your codes across the different
interviews.
d. Review themes.
e. Define and name themes.
f. Produce your report.
Thematic analysis is used in many different research fields, but the
steps are always the same, and here we build our detailed description of
the steps on a famous article, by qualitative researchers in psychology
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, called “Using thematic analysis in
psychology”. We describe the process as you might do it in a business
setting; so, if you are conducting interviews for academic purposes, you
should look up the original article.
1. Familiarization
During the first phase, you start to familiarize yourself with your data.
If you have audio recordings, it’s often necessary to perform some form of
transcription, which will allow you to work with your data. In this phase, you
go through all your data from your entire interview and start taking notes,
and this is when you start marking preliminary ideas for codes that can
describe your content. This phase is all about getting to know your data.
How much you need to transcribe will vary depending on your
project. If you are performing a broad and exploratory analysis, you may
need to transcribe everything that was said and done during the interview,
as you don’t know in advance what you are looking for. If you are
searching for specific topics, you will probably only need to transcribe
those parts of the interview that pertain to that topic. In some cases—e.g.,
when the interview is a minor part of a larger user test or observation
project—writing a detailed summary or summarizing specific themes can
be sufficient. When you consider how much to transcribe, take Braun and
Clarke’s advice: “What is important is that the transcript retains the
information you need, from the verbal account, and in a way which is ‘true’
to its original nature”.

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 Whether you transcribe it yourself or pay someone to do it for you
will depend on your budget and your time. Some researchers prefer to do
it themselves because they can start making sense of the data as they
transcribe; others feel as though they can use their time more efficiently by
reading the finished transcripts that someone else has made.

2.Generating Initial Codes

In phase 2, you assign codes to your data. A code is a brief
description of what is being said in the interview; so, each time you note
something interesting in your data, you write down a code. A code is a
description, not an interpretation. It’s a way to start organizing your data
into meaningful groups. As an example, let’s try to code a snippet from an
interview about video streaming:

“I: So how did you find something?

Peter: Well, first she [his wife] looked at HBO and suggested that we
watch ‘Silicon Valley’, but I’m not really into comedy shows. So, then
she went to Netflix and suggested different movies, but there wasn’t
really anything that I felt like… but then I remembered that we had
been watching ‘Better call Saul’ before the summer holiday, and I
couldn’t really remember if we had watched all the episodes, so we
looked it up and it turned out that we had stopped in the middle of
the season; so, that’s what we watched…”

You can give this section multiple codes (and it’s perfectly fine to
give one section multiple codes) depending on your interests. If you are
interested in different streaming services, you could use the codes “Netflix”
and “HBO”. If your interests are broader or if you are—e.g.—interested in
how people collaborate, you could use the code “coming to an
agreement”. So, which codes you use depend on what is being
said and on the purpose of your research. Your coding also depends on
whether you are performing an exploratory analysis, where the themes
depend on the data, or a deductive analysis, where you search for specific
themes.
There is no clear cut-off between phase 1 and phase 2, and initial
coding often takes place during the familiarization phase. There is specific
software for coding, but you can also code by taking notes on a printed
transcript or by using a table in a Word document. The most important
thing is that you can match the code to the section of the interview that it
refers to. Once you have coded all your data, the next step is to collate all
the sections that fit into each code—e.g., collate all sections in your
interviews with the code “Netflix”. If you are using pen and paper, you will
have to copy sections that have multiple codes so that you can place them
in more than one code category. If you are coding digitally, you can just
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use copy-paste. Braun and Clarke recommend that you code for as many
potentially interesting themes as possible and that you keep a little of the
data surrounding your coded text when you do the coding; that way, you
won’t lose too much of the context.

3.Searching for themes

Whereas codes identify interesting information in your data, themes
are broader and involve active interpretation of the codes and the data.
You start by looking at your list of codes and their associated extracts and
then try to collate the codes into broader themes that say something
interesting about your data. As an example, you could combine the codes
“Netflix” and “HBO” into a single theme called “Streaming services”.
Searching for themes is an iterative process where you move codes back
and forth to try forming different themes. Drawing a map of your codes and
themes or having codes on sticky notes that you can move around can
help you visualize the relationship between different codes and themes as
well as the level of the themes. Some themes might be subthemes to
others. In this process, not all codes will fit together with other codes.
Some codes can become themes themselves if they are interesting, while
other codes might seem redundant, and you can place them in a
temporary mixed theme. At this point, you shouldn’t throw away codes that
don’t seem to fit anywhere, as they may be of interest later.

4.Reviewing Themes
During phase 4, you review and refine the themes that you identified
during phase 3. You read through all the extracts related to the codes in
order to explore if they support the theme, if there are contradictions and
to see if themes overlap. In the words of Braun and Clarke, “Data within
themes should cohere together meaningfully, while there should be clear
and identifiable distinctions between themes.” If there are many
contradictions within a theme or it becomes too broad, you should
consider splitting the theme into separate themes or moving some of the
codes/extracts into an existing theme where they fit better.
You keep doing this until you feel that you have a set of themes that
are coherent and distinctive; then you go through the same process again
in relation to your entire data set. You read through all your data again and
consider if your themes adequately represent the interesting themes in
your interview and if there is uncoded data that should be coded because
it fits into your theme. In this process, you might also discover new themes
that you have missed. Phase 4 is an iterative process, where you go back
and forth between themes, codes, and extracts until you feel that you have
coded all the relevant data and you have the right number of coherent
themes to represent your data accurately. In this iterative process, you
might feel as though you can keep perfecting your themes endlessly, so
stop when you can no longer add anything of significance to the analysis.

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5.Defining and naming themes
During phase 5, you name and describe each of the themes you
identified in the previous steps. Theme names should be descriptive and
(if possible) engaging. In your description of the theme, you don’t just
describe what the theme is about, but you also describe what is interesting
about the theme and why it’s interesting. In Braun and Clarke’s words, you
“define the essence that each theme is about”. As you describe the theme,
you identify which story the theme tells and how this story relates to other
themes as well as to your overall research question. At this point in the
analysis, you should find yourself able to tell a coherent story about the
theme, perhaps with some subthemes. It should be possible for you to
define what your theme is clearly. Moreover, if you find that the theme is
too diverse or complex for you to tell a coherent story, you might need to
go back to phase 4 and rework your themes.
6.Producing the report

What the final report looks like depends on your project; you might
want your final delivery to be personas or user scenarios, but there are
some commonalities you should always include. When you write up your
results, there should always be enough information about your project and
process for the reader to evaluate the quality of your research. Given that,
you should write up a clear account of what you have done – both when
you carried out the research and for your analysis. You already have a
description of your themes, and you can use this as a basis for your final
report. When you present your themes, use quotes of what the participants
said to demonstrate your findings. Video, audio and photo examples are
even more convincing, but NEVER use this without the participant’s
consent. Remember; you have been talking to these participants. To you,
the participants are real humans, each of whom has a set of views and a
host of rights you must respect. It is your job to make the participants feel
real to the people you report your findings to.
In Practical Research 1, splitting your report up into two parts might
be a good idea. Part one contains a summary of your findings in an
engaging way – this could be in a presentation, via personas or user
scenarios. Part two contains the background information about how you
did your research and your full analysis. That way, people who are only
interested in your conclusions can stick to those while people who have
questions about your research can go to the detailed account of what your
work entails. This will ensure the validity of your research and give you a
good reference for the future when you have forgotten all the nitty-gritty
details of your research project.

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References:
Baraceros, E. L. (2016). Practical Research 1, First Edition. Manila: Rex
Book Store, Inc. (RBSI).
https://getthematic.com/insights/qualitative-data-analysis/