Using narrative analysis on qualitative data to identify types of voters

Author / Creator

Winters, Kristi, author

Available as

Online

Summary

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain uses focus groups to collect data on the views and concerns of British citizens before and after elections and referendums. This is a case study in how qua...

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain uses focus groups to collect data on the views and concerns of British citizens before and after elections and referendums. This is a case study in how qualitative electoral data were generated by our open-ended vote choice question, and how those texts were handled, coded, and analyzed to produce our conclusions, specifically how narrative analysis was the analytic basis for the conclusions found in our article, "I Went with What I Always Do ...: A Qualitative Analysis of 'Cleggmania' and Vote Choice in the 2010 British General Election." After using grounded theory method (GTM) and discourse analysis, we applied narrative analysis to systematize and compare the structures of the stories people told. Narrative analysis allowed us to reveal a pattern in the data demonstrating different types of voters, including accounts that revealed that voters with a long-term partisan identification reported psychological obstacles to voting for a different party.

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