Explore traditional and AI-driven methods for qualitative data analysis. Learn how platforms like Sopact Sense streamline coding, sentiment analysis, and storytelling across narrative-rich datasets.
Data teams spend the bulk of their day fixing silos, typos, and duplicates instead of generating insights.
Data teams spend the bulk of their day fixing silos, typos, and duplicates instead of generating insights.
Hard to coordinate design, data entry, and stakeholder input across departments, leading to inefficiencies and silos.
Open-ended feedback, documents, images, and video sit unused—impossible to analyze at scale.
By Unmesh Sheth, Founder & CEO of Sopact
From Traditional Approaches to AI-Driven Insights (2025 Guide)
Picture this. A nonprofit workforce program has just completed its annual cohort. The numbers are ready: test scores improved by an average of twelve percent, eighty-five percent of students finished the training, and sixty percent secured internships. These numbers look promising on the surface, but the director knows they don’t tell the whole story.
Why did some students gain so much more confidence than others? Why did certain groups drop out early? And why do mentors keep hearing whispers about “time burden” from participants?
Traditionally, the solution would be to convene an evaluation team, assign everyone a stack of interviews and open-ended surveys, and begin the painstaking work of coding. Weeks later, patterns would emerge—mentorship, workload, family pressure—but by then the board has already moved on to the next quarter’s priorities. The result is a report that is rigorous but late, trustworthy but ignored.
Recent industry data confirms a rapid shift: over 56% of researchers now use AI to support their qualitative analysis process, up from just 20% in 2023 Thematic.
This is the bind organizations face today. Qualitative data analysis (QDA) is essential for meaning, yet the traditional tempo of analysis no longer matches the tempo of decision-making. Leaders want answers fast, but they don’t want shallow answers. They want depth, but they want it in time to act.
Qualitative data analysis is a process of systematically examining non-numeric information—interviews, focus groups, open-text surveys, field notes, even videos—to discover patterns, themes, and explanations. The goal is not to reduce people’s experiences to statistics; it is to understand what those experiences reveal about outcomes.
Researchers describe the process as moving from raw evidence to coded fragments, from codes to categories, and from categories to themes and interpretations. Done well, it connects the small details of lived experience to the broader shifts organizations are trying to create. That is why evaluators, CSR teams, universities, and accelerators all use it. Numbers may prove that something changed; qualitative analysis explains why it changed, for whom, and under what conditions.
And that “process” matters for search.
People ask directly: “Qualitative data analysis is a process of…?” The clear answer is: it is the process of coding, categorizing, and interpreting narrative evidence to uncover themes and explanations that numbers alone cannot provide.
For decades, evaluators have leaned on a reliable toolkit—each method good at a different job:
These are not relics. They’re essential. A CSR team mapping interviews to SDGs will reach for framework analysis. A researcher exploring student behavior may choose grounded theory. A workforce program spotting barriers like “transportation” and “childcare” will start with thematic analysis.
Reality check: what worked for 20 interviews breaks at 200 transcripts and thousands of survey comments. Decision-makers expect timely, multi-dimensional evidence—not a beautiful report that arrives after the window to act has closed.
Modern qualitative work should live next to your metrics, not in a separate PDF. The practical shift:
That’s how you compress the M&E cycle from months to minutes without losing rigor.
Use the familiar methods—just implement them in a way that fits mixed-method M&E. Below: When to use and a copy-paste Instruction you can run in your analysis workflow.
Devil’s advocate: if quotes aren’t tied to a unique record ID, your correlations will look persuasive and still be wrong. Fix capture first.
Old vs. New: Qualitative That Actually Keeps Up
Old Way
[.d-wrapper]
[.colored-blue]Export messy survey data & transcripts[.colored-blue]
[.colored-green]Manual coding of open-ended responses[.colored-green]
[.colored-yellow]Weeks of cross-referencing with test scores[.colored-yellow]
[.colored-red]Insights arrive too late to inform decisions[.colored-red] [.d-wrapper]
New Way
[.d-wrapper]
[.colored-blue]Collect clean data at the source (unique IDs; quant + qual together)[.colored-blue]
[.colored-green]Type plain-English instructions (themes, summaries, quotes)[.colored-green]
[.colored-yellow]Tool instantly correlates numbers with narratives[.colored-yellow]
[.colored-red]Share a live link that updates automatically[.colored-red] [.d-wrapper]
Year 1 (traditional):
Evaluators used thematic analysis only. After three weeks, they reported themes—“lack of mentorship,” “unclear expectations,” “high time burden.” Useful, but disconnected from outcomes (scores, retention). The funder appreciated the rigor but hesitated to act—anecdotes without impact can feel like noise.
Year 2 (modern mixed-method):
Same thematic approach, supported by automation. Transcripts and survey comments were clustered, draft codes proposed, outliers flagged. Evaluators validated samples, refined the codebook, and finalized themes. In days, not weeks, “mentorship” again emerged—and it linked directly to confidence and completion. Participants reporting strong mentorship finished at higher rates, gained more confidence, and secured more internships.
Bottom line: the conversation shifted from “Did you cherry-pick that quote?” to “Mentorship aligns with +15 points confidence and +20 pp retention—how fast do we scale it?”
Tell it like it is: if your data model can’t join quotes to metrics, you don’t have mixed-method analysis—you have anecdotes. Fix the capture, then run the methods.
Reading about the shift is one thing. Watching it unfold is another. The video below shows how Sopact’s approach transforms reporting: clean data collection feeds into Intelligent Columns, which turn into instant reports that blend qualitative and quantitative. It demonstrates exactly how before/after plays out, and why organizations no longer have to choose between rigor and timeliness.
Qualitative data analysis is not being replaced. It is being re-imagined for an era of scale and speed. Traditional methods—coding, categorizing, interpreting—remain the skeleton. AI is the muscle that allows that skeleton to move faster, further, and with more power.
For evaluators, CSR teams, universities, and accelerators, the message is simple. Numbers matter, but without stories they are brittle. Stories matter, but without numbers they are suspect. When qualitative and quantitative finally converge, decisions gain both heart and backbone.
The future of qualitative data analysis is not either/or. It is hybrid, integrative, and timely. And for organizations willing to embrace that hybrid, the payoff is not only efficiency but credibility—the kind of credibility that wins trust, secures funding, and drives lasting impact.
*this is a footnote example to give a piece of extra information.
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