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Qualitative Methods in Health Research

Office Hours — the companion podcast for the qualitative-methods course

Each episode is meant for listening after the lesson. Sarah and Kiffer add perspective and critique, work through the questions students tend to find most difficult, and add further worked examples, including some that are harder than those in the lesson. Every page has the audio with a visual companion and captions, a summary, a list of chapters and a downloadable transcript.

Foundations & design

Lessons 01 — 04

Foundations of Qualitative Data AnalysisSarah and Kiffer revise an explanation when a case doesn't fit, sort an invented abstract by research goal, audit a codebook change log and debate intercoder reliability.

Research Questions, Theory & the LiteratureSarah and Kiffer question the blank-slate approach to exploratory work, debate pragmatism, and catch a qualitative meta-summary that counts one study four times.

Sampling in Qualitative ResearchSarah and Kiffer test the twelve-interview saturation rule, judge whether invented samples can support their claims, and debate whether saturation should be the standard for qualitative sample size.

Qualitative Data CollectionSarah and Kiffer ask what interviews, observation and traces are each evidence of, practise probes and transcription choices, and catch a guide-made theme in borrowed data.

Coding & frameworks

Lessons 05 — 07

Finding Themes & Building CodebooksSarah and Kiffer test candidate themes for interview-guide artefacts, repair a flawed codebook entry, and show how agreement statistics can mislead for rare codes.

Analysis Frameworks and Conceptual ModelsSarah and Kiffer turn codes into claims, test taxonomies, typologies and a coping cycle, catch a concept map whose arrows outrun its evidence, and debate triangulation and crystallization.

Comparing Variables & Grounded TheorySarah and Kiffer test grounded theory labels on an invented methods section, catch a forced open code, untangle a misleading co-occurrence count and debate negative cases.

Specialized analytic traditions

Lessons 08 — 12

Content AnalysisSarah and Kiffer work through units of counting, latent codebook rules, unitizing disagreements and a reversing newspaper trend, and debate p-values in small studies.

Schema and Narrative AnalysisSarah and Kiffer separate schemas from themes, find the evaluation in an invented story, test Frank's narrative types on loneliness and catch story codas posing as schema evidence.

Discourse Analysis: Conversation and PerformanceSarah and Kiffer work through preference, performance and inferred transcription in discourse analysis, and debate how far analysts should read power into participants' talk.

Analytic Induction, QCA & Decision ModelsSarah and Kiffer test analytic induction, truth tables, necessity claims and decision-tree accuracy on invented cases, catching the traps hidden in remainders, near-constant conditions and base rates.

Computational Text Analysis, Cultural Domain Analysis & LLM-Assisted CodingSarah and Kiffer trace a keyword to one participant, fix a Smith's salience calculation, read consensus as shared belief, catch a prompt-wording trap, and debate language-model coding.