Summary
The episode works through four questions that students commonly find difficult after a first lesson in qualitative data analysis. Sarah and Kiffer move from a pattern to an explanation using invented interview excerpts about small talk with strangers, revise that explanation when a case does not fit, and inventory an invented box of comment cards to show how the definition of a case and the voices missing from a dataset limit what it can answer. A harder example sorts four sentences from an invented abstract by research goal, separating a hypothesis for later work from model testing and showing that a comparison in which age and living alone coincide leaves its explanation open, then identifies the kind of added case that could help separate the rival explanations. The hosts then read an invented codebook change log to see what a second analyst would need, disagree about whether intercoder reliability belongs in interpretive work, and settle on matching the evidence of rigour to the kind of analysis, supported by a positionality memo that names specific expectations.