Hypothesis  Building and Testing

The foundation of hypothesis building  lies in discovering links between  elements  of your data. CAQDAS can help you to  discover these links and with  graphic  facilities display them for you. Two basic ways of organizing and linking  your data are available. The first  of these involves a hierarchical organization. This  is where your data may be classified in a few broad  themes then each theme classified into a number of subcategories each of these into sub  subcategories and so  on. This is similar to the coding used for quantitative data analysis. For example  in figure below you may classify your  data  under the broad  themes  of values concepts and  strategies on reviewing all the data under strategies you may  wish  to divide them into mature and  immature or long term  and short term. Your  values theme may fall naturally into say  internal and  external and  then you  may identify several subcategories such as duty trust and liking.

An alternative approach is to  code  each  section of  data as you work through it and later on to discover ways  of gathering together  like categories that  can be grouped together under common  headings which  can  in turn be grouped together in broad themes and so on. For  example  in the  case above you might identify the concepts of duty trust  and liking from your reading of the data and then  decide to group  all these under a common  heading of values later you may  wish  to have  distinct subheading under values which you  call  internal and external allocating to them  your  original categories accordingly.

The second  way of  organizing  and linking your data  involves  a network  organization.  This is  where  your  categories are more flexibly linked to one another without the rigidity implicit the hierarchical  theory building. Networks can be rearranged in whatever  way suits your developing research  project. Some  software offers  the opportunity to work  with both  networks  and  hierarchies with  tools  for moving  between  them.