If you’re a conservation scientist trained in the natural sciences, you’ll likely be well versed in quantitative research methods – those which gather and analyse numerical data. But what about qualitative methods, the ones which gather text based data? 

In the past decade of working as a conservation social scientist, and delivering training in social science methodologies to conservation scientists, I’ve heard all the myths and misunderstandings going about qualitative methodologies. This blog is here to demystify qualitative research, and explain why it is such a vital piece of the conservation evidence jigsaw puzzle.

Qualitative research: deeper insights into people and the natural world

Let’s start with some of the biggest myths I’ve heard about qualitative research! They tend to fall into three areas:

• It’s not robust – it’s just anecdotal
• It’s not specialist – you don’t need training
• It’s not relevant to conservation – it’s only about people. 

I’m going to tackle the last one right now, because it’s so fundamental. Conservation is about people. It is fundamentally about people’s interaction with the natural world, and our place as part of the natural world. 

I’ll go into this in more depth later in the blog, but qualitative methods allow us to gain deeper insights into human behaviours, motivations and connections with the natural world.  

They are a vital tool to allow us to understand how people interact with and are impacted by the natural world. 

Qualitative research can take us to places numbers alone can’t reach. Which is absolutely crucial in conservation. 

I’ll get onto why qualitative methodologies and analysis are specialist and robust too! 

What is conservation social science? 

Before we get into the details of qualitative research, let’s pause for a quick reminder about the need to diversify the evidence of conservation.  Traditionally, conservation evidence has focused on natural sciences, which tell us about the plants and non-human animals of ecosystems.  It is increasingly being recognised that other sources of evidence are also needed to achieve conservation objectives in ways which are impactful whilst also being socially just and fair.  

Social science is a core source of conservation evidence and relies on both qualitative and quantitative research.  It studies how people behave and are influenced by the world around them, for example in voting and buying patterns, economic markets and risk analysis. 

In the realm of conservation social science allows us to gain insights on the roles people play in developing a healthier, better functioning ecological system, and to understand the impacts of ecological health on people. And that’s what conservation social science is all about: harnessing the people element of the evidence jigsaw for the benefit of the conservation mission. 

What is qualitative data?

Quantitative data, as you may know, are data represented numerically. Data that can be counted, measured, or given a numerical value.

Qualitative data, on the other hand, are non-numerical. These data are most often in the form of words or images, and tend to be drawn from small sample sizes. 

Can qualitative data be quantified – can data gathered in text form be turned into numerical data? Yes… but with a lot of caution. And that might not be the best way of analysing the data.  I’ll get into that in more detail later in this blog. 

What is qualitative data good for?

Qualitative data has many strengths, which we can illustrate with an example. 

The food choices we all make have different environmental footprints.  Imagine you wanted to understand more about people’s eating habits. As a quantitative researcher, you might create a questionnaire of tick box questions asking people to indicate which foods they had bought in a given week from a provided list.  It would provide useful data about what foods the respondents had bought. 

But think about your own food buying and preparation habits for a moment.  Consider what is influencing your choices. Thinking about my own situation, there are a number of factors that affect the food choices I make:

• Environmental impact
• Time to prepare
• Family preferences
• Cost

So, for example, while I would prefer to eat a vegetarian diet, one of my children reliably eats chicken, and so we eat chicken curry as a family fairly regularly.  I know it will meet my family’s nutritional needs better than if I serve a bean curry (which will mostly be left on the plate).  I placate my environmental values by using less chicken and using higher welfare options.

When I have the time to shop around and plan, I think about which businesses and supply chains I am supporting with my money. When I am racing from the office to school and back home, I might nip into the local supermarket to ensure we have something to eat that evening. 

For all of us, meal decisions arise from multiple variables.  None of these complexities would be evident on the tick box form.

Qualitative research methods allow you to explore the ‘why’ factor in greater depth. In this case, asking ‘Tell me about what you had for dinner last night and why you chose that meal?’ instead of asking  ‘how many times did you eat meat in the last week?’ would give greater insight into why particular foods had been chosen. 

Sharing and understanding complex decisions

Another important feature of qualitative methods is that they provide respondents with different opportunities to be heard. Reflecting on your own food choices, which method would allow you the best means to share with a researcher what your diet is like and why – questions with tick boxes and pre-chosen lists of options, or open ended questions inviting you to share your experiences and reasoning?  Which type of question gives you greater scope to share what’s going on? 

So qualitative research can be valuable to both researchers and respondents.  Qualitative research allows the researcher to explore why patterns exist, not just what the patterns are whilst also providing ways for respondents to share their experiences and views more fully and openly.  

Life is complicated. Human decision-making is complicated. Human emotions are complicated. All of this has a bearing on the choices people make in relation to the environment. 

Equally, conservation issues are complex, with competing agendas. It’s vital to not only be able to see what is happening, but to understand why change occurs, why particular patterns exist. 

Qualitative research enables us to gain deeper insight into people’s motivations and perspectives. Which means, as conservation researchers, we have a better understanding of how to consider the role people play in environmental solutions.  

All of these methodologies can offer deeper insights into participants’ decision-making and perspectives on your area of research. They give voice to the meanings and context behind participants’ responses, which is critical when examining issues as complex as those in conservation research. To quote Helen Newing in Conducting Research in Conservation: Social Science Methods and Practice (2011): 

The strength of qualitative interviews is in providing background information and context, generating ideas, and providing in depth information on each participant’s views, perspectives and motivations.  

Common qualitative research methods

I meet too many people who are gathering qualitative data with little or no training.  This particularly seems to be the case for PhD students and post-doctoral researchers whose supervisors or managers have asked them to ‘just do a few interviews and analyse the results’.  

Unfortunately these individuals often find themselves with very little support from experienced qualitative researchers, and end up in stressful and time consuming situations, unaware of the requirements of gathering such data.  Here I’ll talk about some of the methods which can be used to gather qualitative data – but with a warning not to use these unless you have suitable training and support. My qualitative methods for conservation course equips you with this. 

• Questionnaires.  Often thought of as predominantly a quantitative method (tick boxes, Likert scales, etc), questionnaires can be a rich source of qualitative data, with judicious use of open questions. 
• Interviews. This is probably the most commonly used qualitative method I see.  Interviews can take a variety of forms depending on what’s most appropriate for the research. Common forms include unstructured, with very few questions serving as starting points for respondents, semi-structured, with a set of outline questions which can be deviated from to follow the flow of the interview, and walking interviews which can be helpful in establishing a less formal dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.  
• Focus groups. A facilitator guides an invited group of people through a series of questions or tasks and the discussion is captured.
• Workshops. These usually run for a longer session than other methods, enabling you to employ different activities interrogating a particular theme or issue with a group of people
• Document analysis. This allows researchers to analyse written material on a subject in depth, or trace patterns over time.
• Photo voice. A method in which participants take their own photos pertaining to the topic of research, and then offer their reflections about what they chose to photograph. 

A qualitative researcher will consider their research aims, the needs of the respondents, and project resources available in order to select the best method or methods for that project.  

Qualitative data analysis

At the conferences, training and workshops I’ve delivered to natural scientists over the years, one question arises most often:

 ‘How do you analyse qualitative data?’ 

As we’ve discussed, qualitative data is derived from words and pictures – it’s non-numerical. This is the part that is often most mysterious to scientists trained in quantitative approaches.  And whilst I think there are misconceptions about the robustness of all stages of qualitative research, the analysis stage seems to be where the ‘it’s not robust’ criticism gets the most heat.

First of all, let’s address the ‘quantifying qualitative data’ point.  Yes, it is sometimes possible to quantify qualitative data, but this should NOT be the default for qualitative analysis.  Quantifying text responses often loses the richness of the data – which is likely to be a main reason for selecting a qualitative method in the first place.   

And it’s easy to fall into quantifying ‘traps’ too. Conversion must be done with thought about what the data is conveying. For example, if you were conducting interviews about people’s relationship with parks, it may be appropriate to your research question to quantify how often participants talked about feeling happy when in a park. It may not. Counting may present a misleading picture, depending on what the data showed. For example, if a respondent said something like ‘I thought living next to a park would be good for my happiness and wellbeing, but in reality it’s not always the case because of noise.’ – how do you ‘count’ that? 

So if converting to numbers isn’t always helpful, what can you do with your qualitative data? 

To answer that big question, here’s a flavour of one of the key approaches: thematic analysis.

Thematic analysis involves, as you might guess, identifying themes from the data. These themes may have been determined in advance of data collection (a priori), or they emerge from the data. 

For example, interview respondents may be asked what environmental issues they are concerned about in their local area.  One researcher may be interested in seeing how water quality changes are noted by respondents, so would analyse the data looking for where water quality is raised as a concern.  This is when a theme is known in advance of the data collection.  Alternatively, another researcher may be wanting to get a broader picture of all the environmental concerns a community has.  They won’t have any predetermined themes to look for and would analyse the data by identifying all the issues which are raised and grouping them into emergent themes.

Qualitative analysis is an iterative process, often refined across a team or through repeated steps. Themes are reviewed, refined, then clearly defined and a codebook is created. 

The codebook contains clear definitions for each of the themes. This serves a number of functions: it creates transparency and a data trail. It means if a number of people are working on the same source material they have the same guidelines to abide by. And it means if one person is coding the data, they know they are applying the same rules on what text is coded to each theme. And it is a keystone for the research, so if there is any uncertainty on interpretation, decisions can be made with reference to the codebook.

The data is then coded, which can be done in a number of ways: manually, in Word or equivalent, or in specialist software. Does coding involve reading through and marking up the number of times a theme is mentioned? No. It’s more complex than that. It involves understanding the meaning in relation to the theme. 

For example, if a respondent in an interview said that ‘green space isn’t a priority for me, I’m much more concerned with safe cycle routes’, that’s a very different message to a respondent saying something like ‘I wish there were more green spaces within walking distance of my home’. It wouldn’t tell us very much to simply count those responses as two incidences of the theme ‘green space’ arising. 

Instead, it’s about reading the text for meaning, and providing a narrative analysis, which you evidence with quotes. 

Qualitative data: robust, specialist and essential for complex conservation issues!

If you take one thing away from this blog, it’s that qualitative data is essential for interrogating the complex issues found in conservation sciences. It’s about understanding perspectives, meanings and motivations – answering the ‘why’ questions, not just the ‘what’ questions.

And, as I hope you can see from this blog, it’s also a robust practice requiring trained professionals.

You, or members of your team, can be one of those trained professionals. The Qualitative Methods for Conservation course gives you the skills, practice and confidence to use qualitative research methods in your projects. 

Across five online training sessions you’ll learn how to access the richness of qualitative data, and also get an action plan and access to monthly drop-ins to support your developing research practice. In-house, in-person sessions are also available by arrangement.

Find out more, including next dates, here.