Choosing How to Analyse My Primary Research

Now that I have begun collecting written questionnaire responses from autistic adults, I wanted to decide on a clear and appropriate way of analysing the qualitative data. Rather than simply looking for the most common answers, I need a method that will allow me to identify patterns across participants while still recognising individual experiences and differences.

This feels particularly important for my research because one of the strongest things I have already found through my secondary research is that there is no single autistic traveller profile. I therefore do not want my analysis method to flatten participants’ responses into one assumed experience.

Different approaches I considered

Qualitative Content Analysis

Content analysis could be used to organise responses into categories and identify recurring subjects or ideas.

• It could help show which barriers or experiences appear frequently across my questionnaire responses.
• It would give me a fairly clear and structured way of sorting a large amount of written information.
• However, I felt it could become too focused on what is mentioned most often, rather than exploring what participants actually mean and how different ideas connect.

This could still be useful for simple descriptive information, but I do not think it is strong enough on its own for the main qualitative analysis.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis — IPA

I also considered Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis because it focuses closely on how individuals make sense of their lived experiences.

• This would fit well with my interest in autistic lived experience.
• It allows researchers to explore individual experiences in considerable depth.
• However, IPA is normally suited to small, detailed datasets such as lengthy interviews rather than a wider collection of written questionnaire responses.

Because my aim is to identify patterns across multiple autistic adults rather than produce an intensive analysis of only a few individuals, I decided this was not the best fit for this stage of the project.

Reflexive Thematic Analysis

The method that appears most appropriate for my research is Reflexive Thematic Analysis, particularly the approach developed by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke.

Rather than simply counting repeated words or responses, thematic analysis allows me to identify and interpret broader patterns of meaning within the data.

This means I can move from: