Three of my PhD students are nearing completion of their final doctoral dissertation drafts, and as it usually happens with me (despite the many things I have on my plate and the multiple tasks I am juggling all the time), I have become OBSESSED with finding ways to help my graduate students, both my thesis advisees and those who take my classes. This blog post is the result of this obsession. But first, let me provide some background:
I am teaching what I call the perfect combination of courses this summer: Mixed Methods for our Masters in Social Sciences program, and Comparative Public Policy for our PhD in Social Sciences cohort (just the ones doing public policy, though, not the entire cohort). While the latter one is basically a policy studies course, we always end up discussing methodological issues. Not surprising to anyone who knows me, since I am a methodologist in addition to a public policy scholar.
The issue that has me again obsessed is the challenge that my students, and in some ways, my own advisees, are facing at the moment. They are told, when other faculty (and sometimes myself) give them feedback: “your writing is excellent in terms of description, but you don’t write analytically enough”. That is, in other ways, that their text is too descriptive and not analytical enough.
If you’ve read my blog for long, you probably have found an old blog post of mine on how to distinguish between Description and Analysis and the multiple ways in which these are different. However, at the time I wrote that blog post, I don’t think I had it so clear in my head the differences, because there’s another element at play in academic writing that I might have overlooked or explained in a way that obscured the clear differences between Description, Analysis and Interpretation that I did not intend at the time. That element is Argumentation, and I’ll devote a separate blog post to it, as well as a different blog post on how you can combine all these elements in your writing.
Of course, having been a Full Professor for a few years and having spent many years reflecting on these differences and trying to find ways to help graduate (and undergraduate) students, early career scholars and other academics from all ranges, from assistant professor to full professor, I now have a lot more clarity in my brain on how I can differentiate between Description, Analysis and Interpretation, and how to teach learners the differences, as well as a strategy to make it easier to write more analytically. I don’t think I could have thought about this as clearly as I do now in my early years as an assistant professor. Experience both writing articles and books, being a journal editor and part of multiple journal editorial boards, as well as teaching courses on academic writing and research design have all helped me.
Four recent events happened that helped me think about Description, Analysis and Interpretation more clearly. First, I taught a week-long course on foundations of ethnography for political science and public policy. At the last minute, I exchanged the last lecture (3 hours) for a class on how to do ethnographic writing. I taught how to write ethnographic scences and analytical moments. This led me again to think how can I help learners (and students in my courses, as well as my thesis advisees) write more analytically.
The second event was the simultaneous delivery of three of my PhD students’ full dissertations for pre-defense assessments. Many of the faculty who reviewed their theses said to them: “you’re writing good description but need to be more analytical in how you write”. This type of feedback is not different from what I myself have told my own PhD students, but reading it from other faculty made me think that I need to make a more concerted effort to help my students write more analytically, particularly those who are my own thesis advisees.
The third event was a systematic and recurring series of requests for help on how to write more analytically on social media. Most people who read my blog will know that I love helping folks who ask me for advice, particularly when I think that addressing their request will help many more people than those who first asked.
And finally, the fourth event was my coming across Wolcott’s Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation”. I have always taught coding of qualitative data as “transformation” (making data legible for an analytical process), so Wolcott’s suggestion that there are three separate stages of data transformation (Description, Analysis and Interpretation) mirrored how I teach. In fact, my Masters/PhD course is called “Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation”, for good reason. I had read Wolcott’s work but never came across this book, until now. And while the framework I developed is loosely inspired by my recent reading of his book, I came to think about the guiding questions and definitions all on my own over the course of a long process of thinking about this.
The GReDAI (Guide to Write Description, Analysis and Interpretation in Social Sciences’ Research) framework:
After the quite long explanation of how I came to create this framework, here’s how I think of the Description, Analysis and Interpretation (DAI) and how my GReDAI template can be used (you can click on the hyperlink and the template will open in Google Docs – you can then click in the “Copy” button and a new, easy-to-fill-out template will appear in a separate tab – remember that I left two examples on pages 2 and 3 where I filled the entire table with examples from sample projects in areas of my interest (pharmacy-adjacent doctors’ offices and discretionality in street-level bureaucrats’ interactions with citizens). All text is obviously for pedagogical purposes.
Description: The What: For me, Description means the detailed account of what the researcher has observed. What did I find? Detailed, vivid descriptions of the reality of the communities we are studying, fragments of field notes or excerpts from interviews can be used in the Description cell. I want to emphasize, though, that Description can also include and use quantitative, spatial or relational data.
Analysis: The How: When I think of Analysis, I think of the process of finding patterns, relationships, of transforming data into actual insights. How do my data make sense? What patterns do they reveal? The categories that emerge, the connections that are made visible through data processing.
Interpretation: The So What. Once we’ve described what we found, and how what we found is meaningful and relevant, we interpret these findings in light of theoretical expectations, other empirical studies. It’s what Claudio Benzecry and Anselm Strauss frequently ask: “what is this a case of?”. What is the relevance and significance of these empirical results?
Now, while I drafted the GReDAI framework as a table, my expectation would be that folks would write each component sequentially and as a paragraph. The table format is just for pedagogical purposes. In the template page I have included a couple of examples from my own research projects. The quotations included in it are fictitious, but the analysis and interpretation sections mirror actual research that I’ve conducted.
Here’s an example drawing from my own research topics, where the content of the fieldnote and interview is fictitious, but the analysis and interpretation are how I would actually analyze the fieldnote and how I would interpret my findings in light of scholarly works I know and have used in my own writing:
Topic: The Politics and Policies of Elder Care in Mexico
Description: While doing fieldwork in a working-class neighborhood of Guadalajara, I spoke with a woman caring for her elderly mother at home. She explained that hiring formal caregivers was unaffordable, and the public health system offered little support. “It’s up to the family,” she said, “but sometimes, you just can’t manage.” She juggled care, work, and childcare, just like many women in similar situations.
Analysis: This interview, like many I conducted, showed how elder care responsibilities are absorbed by families, especially women, with little institutional support. Care becomes a private burden managed within households, shaped by necessity rather than choice. Care is also not considered part of the duties of government. Instead of providing public services that can offer alternatives for families, these must often rely on the unpaid labor of women in the family, reinforcing existing gender roles and exposing the limits of public service delivery in a critical area: elder care.
Interpretation Challenges facing carers of older individuals reflect a deeper shift in how social protection is structured. As Calarco (2024) shows, women often function as informal safety nets in societies where governments fail to provide adequate support. There is an expectation that families, particularly women within a family, will absorb care responsibilities. This expectation ias not only normalized but even legislated, as it can be found in Article 1 of the Mexican Law for Care of Older Persons. My findings also highlight that what looks like a family matter (caring for our elders) is in fact a policy choice that pushes caregiving duties onto households, making women’s unpaid labor essential yet overlooked (Ballyn et al 2025).
Overall, the full paragraph could look something like this:
While doing fieldwork in a working-class neighborhood of Guadalajara, I spoke with a woman caring for her elderly mother at home. She explained that hiring formal caregivers was unaffordable, and the public health system offered little support. “It’s up to the family,” she said, “but sometimes, you just can’t manage.” She juggled care, work, and childcare, just like many women in similar situations. This interview, like many I conducted, showed how elder care responsibilities are absorbed by families, especially women, with little institutional support. Care becomes a private burden managed within households, shaped by necessity rather than choice. Care is also not considered part of the duties of government. Instead of providing public services that can offer alternatives for families, these must often rely on the unpaid labor of women in the family, reinforcing existing gender roles and exposing the limits of public service delivery in a critical area: elder care. Challenges facing carers of older individuals reflect a deeper shift in how social protection is structured. As Calarco (2024) shows, women often function as informal safety nets in societies where governments fail to provide adequate support. There is an expectation that families, particularly women within a family, will absorb care responsibilities. This expectation ias not only normalized but even legislated, as it can be found in Article 1 of the Mexican Law for Care of Older Persons. My findings also highlight that what looks like a family matter (caring for our elders) is in fact a policy choice that pushes caregiving duties onto households, making women’s unpaid labor essential yet overlooked (Ballyn et al 2025).
Here is another example using a fictitious interview from my bottled water and urban water insecurity project:
Topic: Urban Water Insecurity in Mexico and Bottled Water Consumption
Description: I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a peripheral neighborhood in the outskirts of Aguascalientes, where I observed residents queuing outside a corner store to buy packaged water. A few carried single bottles, others large containers. A woman told me, “Water from the tap smells bad, and the pressure is weak. We have to buy bottled water because we really don’t trust what comes out of the faucet.” While water tankers occasionally delivered water to these neighborhoods, delays and shortages were common. Vendors also would be able to sell water at marked-up prices.
Analysis: For people living in the periphery of such a large city, this phenomenon reflects how bottled water has become a daily solution in contexts of unreliable municipal supply. For many, it is less a consumer choice than a coping mechanism in the face of persistent public service failures. Growing dependence on bottled water, especially in low-income neighborhoods, signals how water insecurity reshapes household survival practices. Informal water provision through bottled water purchase commodifies water instead of making it a human right. Though access to water should be publicly guaranteed by local governments, this trend underscores how access to water is increasingly mediated by the market, reproducing inequalities linked to income, spatial distribution, and service (un/)reliability.
Interpretation As Pacheco-Vega (2020) argues, and my findings confirm, the mere existence of bottled water exemplifies a textbook case of dereliction of duty, where local governments fail to provide water for all households. Informal, private responses emerge in the gaps left by the state. This shift from public to private reshapes how urban water governance operates, moving it away from public service delivery toward fragmented, market-driven access (Wutich et al 2017). As Sultana (2020) argues, this privatization of everyday water needs deepens structural inequalities, making water insecurity a lived experience shaped by distrust, informal economies, and blurred lines between public provision and private markets. Rather than strengthening public service delivery, bottled water effectively commodifies the human right to water and reduces the vital liquid to a marketable good (Zenner 2020).
The full paragraph would look something like this:
I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a peripheral neighborhood in the outskirts of Aguascalientes, where I observed residents queuing outside a corner store to buy packaged water. A few carried single bottles, others large containers. A woman told me, “Water from the tap smells bad, and the pressure is weak. We have to buy bottled water because we really don’t trust what comes out of the faucet.” While water tankers occasionally delivered water to these neighborhoods, delays and shortages were common. Vendors also would be able to sell water at marked-up prices. For people living in the periphery of such a large city, this phenomenon reflects how bottled water has become a daily solution in contexts of unreliable municipal supply. For many, it is less a consumer choice than a coping mechanism in the face of persistent public service failures. Growing dependence on bottled water, especially in low-income neighborhoods, signals how water insecurity reshapes household survival practices. Informal water provision through bottled water purchase commodifies water instead of making it a human right. Though access to water should be publicly guaranteed by local governments, this trend underscores how access to water is increasingly mediated by the market, reproducing inequalities linked to income, spatial distribution, and service (un/)reliability. As Pacheco-Vega (2020) argues, and my findings confirm, the mere existence of bottled water exemplifies a textbook case of dereliction of duty, where local governments fail to provide water for all households. Informal, private responses emerge in the gaps left by the state. This shift from public to private reshapes how urban water governance operates, moving it away from public service delivery toward fragmented, market-driven access (Wutich et al 2017). As Sultana (2020) argues, this privatization of everyday water needs deepens structural inequalities, making water insecurity a lived experience shaped by distrust, informal economies, and blurred lines between public provision and private markets. Rather than strengthening public service delivery, bottled water effectively commodifies the human right to water and reduces the vital liquid to a marketable good (Zenner 2020).
Obviously, these examples are just for pedagogical purposes, but the main goal is to show how we can identify and write better Description, Analysis and Interpretation. Also, I recognise that in my second example, the paragraph is perhaps too long and each component could be written as a separate one. But that’s neither here nor there, and my goal is more to show how I believe different elements can be better written.
Hopefully the GReDAI template will be useful to my readers. I am already piloting it with my students and my thesis advisees, and it appears as though it’s being helpful.
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