Case studies / Public services
Framework Analysis Comparing Perspectives Across Several Stakeholder Groups
Thirty interviews and eight focus groups from groups using different vocabulary, compared without flattening what made each distinct.
The challenge
What the organisation came with
A public sector organisation held interview and focus group data from several stakeholder groups and needed to compare their perspectives to support strategic decision-making.
The groups had different priorities and, more awkwardly, different terminology for the same things. A word that signalled a serious concern in one group was routine usage in another, so naive comparison would have produced differences that were linguistic rather than substantive.
The requirement was a single analytical framework allowing meaningful comparison across groups, without collapsing the context that made each group’s account distinct.
The approach
How it was analysed, and why that method
Why framework analysis
The five-stage framework approach was used: familiarisation, constructing a thematic framework, indexing the data against it, charting into matrices, and interpretation. Its defining feature is the matrix — cases as rows, themes as columns — which makes comparison across groups structural rather than impressionistic.
Grounded theory was rejected. The organisation had predefined evaluation questions to answer; grounded theory sets out to generate new theory from the data and would have been the wrong instrument for a comparison against fixed terms of reference.
With cases charted against a shared framework, you can read across a theme to see how each stakeholder group described it, and down a case to see that group’s account whole. Both views come from the same coded data.
Handling the vocabulary problem
The framework was defined at the level of the underlying concept rather than the words used, with group-specific terminology recorded against each theme. That preserved the difference in language as a finding in its own right instead of letting it masquerade as a difference in opinion.
Delivered
What the client received
The value
What changed as a result
The findings informed strategic planning, supported organisational decision-making and provided evidence for future programme development.
The matrices remained usable after delivery: when a new question arose, it could be answered from the charted data rather than by returning to 500 pages of transcripts.
Written from the assigned statistician's own project notes. The client is not named and no identifying detail, data or figures are published. Scale and timeframe are approximate.
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The services behind this work
Qualitative coding
Codebooks, systematic coding and themes evidenced back to the extracts.
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