Some aspect of qualitative analysis

Przepraszamy, ten wpis jest dostępny tylko w języku Amerykański Angielski.

Dear followers of the Concise project, we have some great news to share with you!

Recently we have finished the qualitative analysis of all five public consultations, which is bringing the Concise project into its final stages. This feat would have been impossible without the vigorous work of the national teams from Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal. Seem like an easy task, you say? This post will try to show you in more detail the massive amount of work put into analysis.

Each public consultation consisted of at least 16 discussion tables, which resulted into whopping 464 recorded hours of intensive discussions, or, if you fancy text over audio, into staggering 3,320 written pages. This mind-blowing amount of data was tamed by members and collaborators of each national team.

First, teams laboriously transcribed the audio recording. Then, they carefully coded the transcribes according to a previously agreed-upon codebook. For example, if some participant was a vocal opponent of GMO, then his idea of banning all GMO products would be assigned to a code representing “distrust”. After that, teams accessed the coded discussions using specialised Nvivo software. This gave us some juicy bits of data desperately waiting for further analysis.

However, work on the qualitative analysis was not just yet finished. Each team prepared its own qualitative report, which summarized key data. The qualitative reports were divided into 4 parts (+ one summarizing the whole analysis) corresponding with the scientific topics chosen: climate change, GMO´s, vaccination, and alternative and complementary medicine.

These separate parts were further divided into three sections, as there were three main objectives of CONCISE:

  1. How citizens are informed
  2. Reliability of sources
  3. Proposals to improve scientific communication

To try to illustrate the scale of our project, we will offer you a comparison of the occurrence of codes (namely, references) found in just the Italian and Slovak outlines. Analysis of the public consultations held in these two countries identified a total number of 8,631 references (see table). Taking into account that data from Poland, Spain, and Portugal are missing from this table, the complete number will be surely astonishing.

References found per section

  Italy Slovakia
How citizens are informed 2,022 3,302
Reliability of sources 710 1,252
Proposals to improve scientific communication 507 838
Total 3,239 5,392

For the moment, we cannot show you the full data just yet. However, soon the CONCISE partners will present their project results in separate national events. Stay tuned!