Analyze consultation data

From: Privy Council Office

Overview

Public engagements and consultations can result in a large number of textual responses, a type of qualitative data. Engagement practitioners and analysts may use experts, research methods and digital tools to analyze large qualitative datasets. Effective analysis of this data allows analysts to better prepare and communicate key findings to decision makers and report back to participants.

These lessons in content analysis aim to help engagement practitioners explore, analyze and use qualitative data. They are an overview of methods used in content analysis. They also show an example analysis done by Open North with a typical Government of Canada consultations dataset.

Lessons cover the following topics:

1. What to do with all this data?
2. What is content analysis?
3. Using Python for content analysis
4. Preparing qualitative data for analysis
5. An example of content analysis

Suggested ways to use these lessons:

• Practise with an open dataset
• Analyze your own consultations data
• Train others to analyze content

These lessons were developed after a 2017 to 2018 collaborative project with Open North. The project aimed to apply content analysis to consultations datasets found on Open government.

This educational tool is intended to complement other engagement planning resources available online or through your organization.

We’re always looking for ways to improve. If you use this set of lessons and find it is incorrect or missing something, please share your feedback with us through our community of practice on GCcollab.