different approaches to textual data analysis: 1.Narrative Analysis: A narrative is essentially that is depicted representado  through and interview or a document 2. Grounded theory An approach to develop theory inductively from textual data 3.Discourse analysis , 4 content analysis 

THE main ones you could use for international relations: CONTENT ANALYSIS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROCESS tracing 

A qualitative content analysis :It is an economical text analysis procedure and it ivolves counting and quantifying elements in qualitative data 

STEPS of CONTENT ANALYSIS: 1collecting data corpus of data selection of texts images or other data. 2. learn the content of the data,3 create the codebook  coding matrix codes derive from:externally from research literature and theory or developed by reviewing the data itself codes could be text visual or characters or individual also. 4 enter and cleaning the data 5 do the analysis 

When to use visual:Visual analysis Media documentFilms, photos, posters  /Text analysis –  Word count and or KWIC - key-words-in-context

Create a codebook and codes:1Definition of codebook - a list of all the codes you developed for the analysis Number of codes – 2The process of developing codes stops when you reach saturation (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) with no more issues identified in the data

Validatingcodeswith 7Rs Aneffectivecodeshouldmeet the 7Rs:Relevant to the research topic Represents the issue well Recognisedin data Repeated in data (within or across texts) Raised by participants Ratified by others in the research team Retrieves applicable text segments.

Computer based content analysis: QDA MINER/ATLAS

pocess tracing:is telling an empirical story in a sistematic way that highlights causal processes in the context of a sequence of events applied to tell a causal story linking an explanatory variable to an observed outcome what for:It helps to identify and systematically describe novel political and social phenomena 2It assists in the evaluation of pre-existing explanatory hypotheses, and also helps generate new hypotheses and assess new causal claims. It can therefore be used deductively or inductively 3 It helps you gain insight into causal mechanisms It provides a complementary means of addressing limitations posed by statistical tools for causal inference (Collier, 2011: 824) 

PROCESS tracing steps:identify hypotheses 2 establish timeline 3 construct casual graph indentify alternative event choice at each moment 5 identify counterfactual outcomes HOW: set time boundaries for your study where in time to begin and and where to end your process tracing  step 2 exampe tunisia cuan atras step 2state the casual mechanism finding the evidence needed to show that a particular event  or decision was the likely cause of an outcome interview and document based reaseacrch