Most CLIPs gather qualitative data (narrative information) to answer their inquiry questions. When doing qualtitative analysis, its critical to begin data analysis as soon as possible after you begin data collection and continue to analyze data during the collection effort. As you do the analysis, you will develop various levels of understanding.

1. Read through your data with an eye for categories, patterns, and relationships.
2. Write brief memos and/or hold analytic meetings to capture CLIP members' individual and collective thinking and tentative ideas of categories and relationships in the data.
3. Code the data based on categories drawn from existing research and categories that emerge from the data.
4. Search for emerging relationships, patterns, themes, and issues in the coded data.