Immediately after each data collection exercise has taken place the researcher usually transcrip
interviews and observation notes. Carrying out the transcription personally can help you to begin to analyse them while you can recall the event. Then you can interrogate the transcriptions manually and identify initial categories; each category should emerge directly from the raw data. You should purposely ignore any assumptions or interpretations at this point, although you can take and retain notes, and include them in subsequent stages of the analysis. In this way you will ensure