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Qualitative Data:

Beyond Satisfaction Surveys

Elinor Hegarty

4/16/2026

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CONTENT REVIEW

01

A Brief Review

Is Qual right for you?

Planning for Success

Questions

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It’s more than satisfaction surveys…

Allows you to see how people utilize spaces, what they do in specific situations, etc.

Observations

Help you understand ideas, beliefs, and thoughts about topics of interest. Also allows you to collect personal/demographic data of participants.

Interviews/Surveys

Using public records, social media content, meeting minutes, etc. gives insight into policy readiness, voting patterns, and previous attempts at addressing the same problem.

Documents

What ‘Counts’ as Qualitative Data?

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Relevance to your work

Unexpected Outcomes

Incidental Data

Interventions (a policy, a systems change, an environmental change) don’t have the outcome you expect

Exposure to qualitative data by interacting with community members, participating in events, and living and working in the same environment as the people we partner with and serve.

Having qualitative data skills in your toolbox allows you to manage…

Navigating Novelty

New geographic areas, new communities, new health concerns, new political climates, unknown barriers/facilitators.

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Evaluation Question: What are the community’s most pressing transportation related concerns?

Research Question: How do people make decisions about what kind of transportation they take to work/school.

Project Aim: Increase safe, active transportation.

Navigating Novelty: Working in a new neighborhood

Project Design: Address transportation concerns and make active transportation more accessible and preferable.

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Decision

Criteria

Why choose qualitative data collection and/or analysis?

Collect compelling stories/anecdotes
Understanding meaning
Explore complicated phenomenon
Gather the scope of an unexplored topic
Understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of something

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Decision

Criteria

Why choose qualitative data collection and/or analysis?

Gather the scope of an unexplored topic

What is the most appropriate method?

Transportation Example

Observations
Interview/ Survey
Documents

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Align Methods

Who? are you collecting data from?

Who? is the audience for your findings and what will move them?

Why? what method makes sense?

How? will you do this?

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Align Methods

Who are you collecting data from?

Participant Variables - people who live, go to school, and work within a 5-mile radius
Sample size - can be modest
Audience - City Council

How

Staff and physical resources

What

Interviews!

Transportation Example

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Working Backwards

What do you hope to learn?

What questions/strategies would allow you to learn those things?

Are there any preexisting questions/guides for similar topics that have been validated?

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Work Backwards

We want to understand how people make decisions about what type of transportation to use to go to work/school

No preexisting questions/guides for similar topics have been validated

What questions/strategies would allow you to learn those things?

Let’s look at the matrix…

Transportation Example

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Question Matrix

Possible Questions	Desired Outcome	Topic Area
		How people make decisions about what type of transportation to use to go to work/school
	- Discussion of why people use the transportation they use - Discussion of why people don’t use alternative transportation options - Discussions on what factors might change the transportation they use	How people make decisions about what type of transportation to use to go to work/school
How do you typically get to work? Have you always done it that way? Do you wish you could get to work a different way?	- Discussion of why people use the transportation they use - Discussion of why people don’t use alternative transportation options - Discussions on what factors might change the transportation they use	How people make decisions about what type of transportation to use to go to work/school

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	Questions	Pros	Cons	When
Open-ended questions	Can you walk me through your morning? What is your typical weekday routine?	- Allows the participant to ‘drive’ and share what they feel is most important. - New topics arise that you hadn’t considered.	- Challenging to make inferences about/between multiple interviews. - Don’t always discuss what you are most interested in (probes can help).	-When you are exploring a topic you know almost nothing about. - When you are working with people or in a location you are unfamiliar with.
Semi-structured	-How do you typically get to work? -Have you always done it that way? -Do you wish you could get to work a different way?	-Narrows the focus of the answers given. -Easier to look at data sets together.	-Slightly restricts the introduction of novel topics.	-When you already have ideas about what is relevant. -There are specific topics you need to understand for your analytic framework.
Structured	-Do you walk to work? Why or why not?	-Very easy to compare answers across interviews.	-No room for novel topics to be discovered.	-You have a hypothesis based on previous work or literature that you want to address.

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Analysis

CEPEG’S Virtual Access Point - https://sites.google.com/view/cepeg-resources/evaluation-start-to-finish

Analytic Frameworks:

Additional Resources

Content –Measuring frequencies of words, phrases or concepts/Looking for patterns in large data sets
Narrative – exploring individual stories (case studies)
Discourse – looking at language-use to understand nuance and meaning-making
Thematic – identifying themes across a data set – helps establish context
Grounded – aiming to build new theories based on patterns observed in data sets
Phenomenological – exploring meaning-making and lived-experiences

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Common Barriers

Successful Solutions

Resources and time

Low response rate

Data goes nowhere

Focus groups, short surveys, and existing data

Spend time understanding how you can be of service first

Have a plan

Common Barriers

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THANK YOU