For this assignment, you are going to practice conducting a simple qualitative analysis. Specifically, you will conduct a qualitative content analysis (QCA) in which you will assign codes to qualitative data and summarize your findings. You will be provided with authentic data from a study involving motivation for religious sacrifice. In this study, participants were asked to respond to the open-ended prompt, “Please describe a time when you gave something up for religious reasons.” Twenty responses were selected from the larger study for this assignment and have been provided to you in the attached file (Qualitative Analysis Project.docx). The purpose of this analysis is to determine the types of religious sacrifices most frequently reported by religious individuals.
To the right of the responses, you will find a coding frame with five different categories (i.e., types of sacrifice): immoral entertainment, food, drugs/alcohol, sexual behavior, and money. Each category has been color-coded for you. Read through each of the responses and determine whether any part of the text belongs to one of the categories from the coding frame. For example, if the text were to state, “I gave up eating chocolate during lent,” it would be coded as a “food” sacrifice and assigned to the food category. When you find text that matches one of the categories, use the highlighter feature in Word to highlight the text in the corresponding color. Note that a single response may contain text belonging to more than one category.
When you finish coding all of the responses using the highlighter, go back and count the number of responses that contained text from each of the five categories. Once you have the count, divide that number by 20 to find the percentage of responses that correspond to that category. Enter this information into the table at the bottom of the page. Note that the percentages will likely add up to more than 100% because some responses may be counted more than once if they contain text from more than one category. Finally, write a brief description of your findings. Explain (in words) which categories were most common and provide a brief quote from the responses that you think best illustrates each respective category.
