The following is a modified excerpt from Applied Qualitative Research Design: A Total Quality Framework Approach (Roller & Lavrakas, 2015, pp. 34-37).

Once all the data for a qualitative study have been created and gathered, they are rarely ready to be analyzed without further analytic work of some nature being done. At this stage, the researcher is working with preliminary data from a collective dataset that most often must be processed in any number of ways before “sense making” can begin.

For example, it may happen that after the data collection stage has been completed in a qualitative research study, the researcher finds that some of the information that was to be gathered from one or more participants is missing. In a focus group study, for instance, the moderator may have forgotten to ask participants in one group discussion to address a particular construct of importance—such as, the feeling of isolation among newly diagnosed cancer patients. Or, in a content analysis, a coder may have failed to code an attribute in an element of the content that should have been coded.

In these cases, and following from a Total Quality Framework (TQF) perspective, the researcher has the responsibility to actively decide whether or not to go back and fill in the gap in the data when that is possible. Regardless of what decision the researcher makes about these potential problems that are discovered during the data processing stage, the researcher working from the TQF perspective should keep these issues in mind when the analyses and interpretations of the findings are conducted and when the findings and recommendations are disseminated.

It should also be noted that the researcher has the opportunity to mind these gaps during the data collection process itself by continually monitoring interviews or group discussions. As discussed in this Research Design Review article, the researcher should continually review the quality of completions by addressing such questions as Did every interview cover every question or issue important to the research? and Did all interviewees provide clear, unambiguous answers to key questions or issues? In doing so, the researcher has mitigated the potential problem of knowledge gaps in the final data.

 

 

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