Once you’ve gathered interviews, fieldnotes, or artifacts, the big question looms: How do I actually make sense of it all? This two-day workshop introduces Dr. Sarah Tracy’s Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis (PIQDA)—an adaptable, umbrella approach designed to create practical wisdom and transformative insight. Participants will learn how to move back and forth between data and theory, code with curiosity, and craft claims that matter. Along the way, we’ll explore a range of analysis techniques, from foundational coding practices to advanced interpretive and artistic approaches.

Through examples from Sarah’s research on leadership, compassion, and organizational life, participants will see how PIQDA works in action and gain tools they can apply immediately to their own projects.

By the end of the workshop, you will:

• Understand the distinctive features of PIQDA, including its abductive and iterative approach to generating practical insight.
• Revisit and refine your guiding research question as an analysis map.
• Organize and prepare qualitative data for analysis, choosing among manual and digital technologies.
• Apply primary-level coding techniques such as open coding and in-vivo coding, and practice moving to second-level conceptual coding.
• Develop and use a qualitative codebook to guide analysis.
• Distinguish between coding, interpretation, and claim-making.
• Explore the ethics and practical options of using large-language AI to support coding and analysis.
• Practice heuristic activities for claim-making and interpretation, such as jeopardy research questions, conceptual cocktail parties, negative case analysis, and abduction.
• Be introduced to advanced and complementary analytic approaches, including vignette analysis, typologies, metaphor and narrative analysis, explanation/causality, discourse tracing, deconstruction, and arts-based strategies.
• Experiment with creative examples, such as drawing analysis and LEGO® Serious Play®.

We’ll accomplish all this in a supportive environment that blends lecture, hands-on practice, and behind-the-scenes case studies. Participants will leave with a repertoire of analytic strategies, a stronger sense of how to make their qualitative research compelling, and the confidence to push their analysis from data to insight to impact.

Resources for this workshop draw from Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact (3rd ed., Wiley, 2025) and Sarah’s research in the areas of innovative qualitative research and organizational communication. Sarah has published more than 100 scholarly essays, presented her qualitative research over 350 times to scholarly, professional, and pedagogical audiences and is a LEGO® Serious Play® Certified Facilitator.