Training · University of Birmingham / ASP-belong international research team
Qualitative Analysis Across Three Countries
““Discovering new things and making change is really good.” - workshop participant”
The challenge
A three-country research team needed rigorous analysis without flattening language, context or disagreement
The ASP-belong team was analysing interviews with young people and school staff across the UK, Portugal and Czechia. Team members had different levels of qualitative experience, the data crossed languages and sites, and the project needed enough consistency for collaboration without pretending every researcher would interpret data in exactly the same way.
What we did
Live coding, disagreement exercises and multilingual analysis built a shared approach across sites
Open Routes Research designed a three-hour online workshop with minimal slides and continuous hands-on analysis. Participants explored qualitative epistemology, reflexivity, coding, codebooks, analytic quality and disagreements using realistic extracts. The final section focused on multilingual and multi-site analysis: coding in original languages, translation notes, culturally specific concepts, shared versus site-specific codes and how to protect meaning when moving between languages.
What changed
The team left with common analytic foundations and clearer rules for coding, reflexivity and cross-country comparison
The workshop made analytic choices visible and discussable across the team. Researchers developed a shared vocabulary for what counts as good qualitative evidence, clearer distinctions between codebooks and coding frameworks, and practical options for documenting disagreement instead of treating difference as an error. This created a stronger foundation for collaborative analysis across the three sites.
Outputs
Three-hour bespoke workshop; coding exercises; multilingual-analysis guidance; codebook and disagreement exercises; follow-up resources