Violence against women and girls funding review: analysis of responses

Annex B: Technical approach to qualitative analysis

The call for evidence included 22 open-ended questions with free-text fields. To analyse these responses, the research team followed the following approach:

Developing an initial codebook of themes

Following the approach developed by Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2007), the team created an initial set of themes and ideas based on the call for evidence and wording of specific questions (the deductive phase), with further themes added as part of the review process (the inductive phase). This set of themes formed the basis of a codebook to ensure consistency across members of the research team, with each theme in the codebook reviewed until the team agreed criteria and examples of the theme.

Reading and coding

Free-text responses for each open-ended question were read, reviewed and coded into themes, with team members adding to the codebook as needed. A set of 12 organisational responses submitted via email were manually reviewed in their entirety, in addition to all responses submitted via Citizen Space. Additionally, notes from 7 roundtable events were read, analysed and reviewed after finalising the analysis of call for evidence responses. When new opinions or themes emerged, they were incorporated into the analysis of the call for evidence question that most closely matches the topic discussed.

For each open-ended question, a descriptive summary has been presented of key themes emerging from the text analysis. While it is difficult to provide accurate counts of responses allocated to each theme, in general themes are presented in approximate order of the number of corresponding responses. Individual quotes have been included where appropriate to illustrate the narrative around specific themes, and quotes were only selected from respondents who provided permission for their views to be published and with any potential identifiers (such as the name of a specific organisation) removed.