Analysing thin qualitative data using Excel

This video walks through the steps of analysing the responses to a thin qualitative question using Excel. Using Excel can provide a useful way of organising and analysing thin qualitative data - and can be especially useful if sharing your progress with supervisors or co-researchers. The video uses data from a published mixed-methods paper (Exploring university student perspectives of a challenge-based curriculum - https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.70013 ). The video: introduces the paper downloads the original raw data from Qualtrics adds a "key" to the raw data in Excel so you can keep track of participant data across different sheets adds new sheets to analyse each question reduces the original data down to columns of interest removes participants who did not provide any data - using LEN (the number of characters in a cell), and custom sort (by rows - top to bottom) rearranges data back into the original order before adding a second key changes column width and uses wrap text uses COUNTA to count non-empty cells uses custom sort (by column - left to right) to order columns with more material uses custom sort (by row) to group material from one theme together uses AVERAGE to calculate the average number of characters provided by participants illustrates how the final Excel sheet relates to the relevant section in the published paper