Writing a qualitative results section
This is a missive from the trenches of research. I’m trying to write up half of the results section of a qualitative paper from the outline I’ve drafted. In qualitative research, the writing is not just reporting results but part of the research itself.
I‘m sharing this example because I’ve been doing qualitative research for 15 years, at this point, and I still need to find ways to manage the different mind traps of writing. This is one of two qualitative papers I'm writing up this year, and one of many I've written thus far in my career. With time and experience, I’m getting faster at identifying the mind trap and having strategies to get out of it. Maybe someday I’ll even avoid them all together. But if you are newer to qualitative research, I want you to know you are not alone, and give you ideas for how you can manage your own writing process.
I need to confirm prior iterations of analysis and write it up in a way that’s not just a list. I’m also trying not to overwrite by 1000 words or more. I’m aiming for the proverbial “crappy first draft” that I will improve over time and with the help of my (many, and interprofessional) coauthors
In my attempt not to overwrite the length, I give myself some boundaries based on word count. Of the 3500 words for the ultimate draft for a clinical journal, I’ll probably use 300 for intro, 500-800 for methods, 1-2k for results, and 800-1200 for discussion & conclusion. If I aim for 2k for results right now (knowing I could edit things down), it would mean 1k or less for the first section of the results reporting challenges. We identified 4 types (themes? subthemes?) of challenges, so that’s 250 words per “flavor”. Within each type of challenge, like disease related challenges, there’s usually 5-6 sub-elements, so basically each element gets a sentence each. Some elements can get quotes but not all.
I started by both skimming the coded data to confirm the take-aways we have outlined but then I kept finding different awesome quotes and my brain tried to re-adjudicate the analysis and I wrote 500 words where I needed 100.
So I stopped and checked in with a coauthor and peer qualitative expert. She validated this stage of the process, and agreed with the following plan:
Close the data and quotes.
Write a bare bones generic description of the section.
Go back to Atlas, skim each code to “check” my analytic summary, add specificity.
Add 1-3 high-value (surprising, pithy, unusual) quotes to paragraphs.
Choose 1-2 longer quotes on different themes for the table.
As a result, I finished my task of writing the generic description – 800 words so far - in the same time that it took me to overwrite the first half of the first challenge type.
Sometimes in the process of doing this you realize you don’t have the story straight yet. This also happened to me recently. Though ideally I’d do this before trying to write the results, I realized I needed to back and review the data and do some memoing to figuring out the story.
I’m working with data coded in Atlas.ti, and for each code, I’m reviewing the data and summarizing each quote with a bullet point in a memo. Then I re-organize the bullets by type (however my brain is wanting to group them), and write headers, and re-write those headers until they are phrases that can be complied into sentences.
What other ideas do you use to get unstuck?