Doing Research

2nd May 20252nd May 2025

A Practical Guide to Thematic Analysis with MS Word and Excel

This video tutorial addresses a common methodological challenge in qualitative research: the efficient and systematic analysis of textual data when specialized software is unavailable. Quite often, I find research student I work with are looking for qualitative analytical techniques without having to access dedicated Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS). This 30-minute guide offers a practical solution by demonstrating a clear and accessible method for conducting thematic analysis utilizing widely available Microsoft Office Suite applications: MS Word and Excel.

Thematic analysis, a foundational method in qualitative methods, involves identifying, organizing, and interpreting patterns of meaning (themes) across a dataset. This video provides a step-by-step approach to this process, adapted for implement within a standard word processing programme and a spreadsheet application. This approach can be beneficial for researchers with limited resources or those seeking a transparent and auditable research workflow.

Thematic Analysis with MS Word and Excel by Suranga Jayasena

Guidance for Engaging with this Tutorial:

To maximize the utility of this guide, viewers are encouraged to follow along with their own qualitative data or a sample dataset. The tutorial will cover the following key stages:

Data Preparation in MS Word: Learn techniques for organizing and annotating your textual data within a Word document to facilitate systematic coding.
Utilizing the “Extract Comments to New Document” Macro: This step uses a custom MS Word macro, developed by Lene Fredborg (available for download here) to efficiently extract coded segments and their corresponding labels into a new document. It is recommended that you navigate to this link and install the macro prior to commencing the data analysis steps demonstrated in the video.
Theme Development and Organization in MS Excel: Discover how to import the extracted codes into Excel for further organization and categorization. This section will cover techniques for sorting and filtering to bring back thematic blocks of coded data to MS Word to facilitate the inductive development of qualitative interpretations.

By the end of this tutorial, you will gain a practical understanding of how to conduct a rigorous thematic analysis using familiar software, thereby enhancing your capacity for in-depth qualitative data interpretation.

Best Wishes!

29th June 202313th November 2023

Mind Mapping Your Initial Research Interest

Mind mapping is a graphical technique used to visually organize information and ideas. It is a creative and effective tool for organizing thoughts. In this presentation, I explain how you can effectively use MindMup 2, a free tool for mind mapping, to organize your initial ideas when you are starting your research.

Click on double-sided arrow on bottom-right of the presentation to make it full-screen.

25th July 202013th November 2023

New to research? Complete two paragraphs by filling the spaces with the words given. You can try as many times you want. Try to complete with minimum attempts. Think logically.

18th October 20167th November 2023

A little advice for reviewing literature

This little guide would help you in doing your dissertation thesis. This is not a comprehensive guide for literature reviewing, instead it address two interlinked important aspects. These ideas occurred to me while I was reviewing students’ write ups of their literature review. You may have already started your review or planning for it. At either stage, these views might help you to do a better review.

When writing your literature review, you have to be very clear about the facts you are presenting. It is important to indicate the reliability of the facts. In literature there are;

– Opinions
– Experiences
– Findings, and
– Conclusions

In your review these should be clearly identified. In terms of knowledge, above is in the increasing order of value. In general Findings through a research study are stronger than experience. Opinions can be merely assumptions in many cases, therefore not the proper knowledge. Conclusions are the strongest because it combines the findings to the current knowledge. However, the general situation may vary depending on the quality of the work. For example, if the findings are combined with poor literature review (current knowledge), the conclusions may become totally unreliable, but findings may be valuable.

This shows the requirement of you to be able to identify the quality of a study. Then you can use the knowledge effectively. That is why we say it is a critical review of literature. You just don’t buy in what is given.

Second point; we should indicate what type of knowledge is presented in our write-up. For example

The opinion of most researchers was that BIM should be implemented as a national policy (Abd, 2006; …) . However, Bimman (2012) suggests that organizations need not to wait for such policy. He has shown that XYZ Architects in Australia has successfully implemented BIM on their own. However, his description about the implementation indicates that XYZ Architects have not gained the full benefit of BIM implementation as their structural engineers and quantity surveyors were not BIM ready.

The above example starts with opinion, then another opinion by Bimman which becomes weak conclusion when combined with experience, then a critical review of the conclusion. You got to think of these things from the reader’s point of view.