Increasingly, in field studies, researchers will give copies of the results to participants to see if they have gotten the story right. They can then use footnotes to indicate where the participants feel questions of fact or interpretation are not correct. The researcher does not have to change his interpretations, but should not divergent views from respondents. One of the biggest problems with qualitative research is data reduction. The researcher can have over 1000 pages of transcription from an intensive interview study with an N of 30.
Field notes can be voluminous.
Data reduction typically involves reading through all data sources, developing descriptive and analytic files, developing categones from these files and gradually reducing the number of categories in a parsimonious fashion. With intensive interviews, the process involves marking excerpts of interest in the transcripts, grouping like excerpts together, and naming these groupings, called categories. Gradually the number of different analytic categories are grouped and regrouped until a manageable number emerges and a logical pattern or model across categories can be developed. Sensitizing concepts and theoretical models can result. It is the development of conceptual models than distinguish field and intensive interview studies from newspaper accounts.