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Visual Inspection of Sequential Data: A Research Instrument for Qualitative Data Analysis

Sequence analysis has been widely used to investigate the patterns of similarities and differences of sequential data in biology and sociology. However, the debate on the usage of sequence analysis in social sciences has not been settled yet. Among a long list, sequence analysis methods have been criticized for ignoring the qualitative information behind the sequences. This paper presents a new instrument for inspecting sequential data visually in qualitative studies. The method includes building a hierarchical tree of relations among the categories which is then used to recode the categories systematically. The recoding process is meant to give meaning to the differences among categories and, therefore, increases our ability to see the differences. The instrument is a fruit of a qualitative study carried out to explore student’s learning patterns. The focus in this paper will be on the algorithm of recoding the categories and how the emergent codes can be plotted to generate insights for further qualitative investigation.