FEATURE ARTICLE Qualitative Analysis of Latino Parents' Religious Interpretations of Their Child's Disability

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate three ways of analyzing qualitative interview data: content, cultural models, and narrative analyses. We draw upon the same set of interview data with 250 Latino parents of young children with mental retardation or developmental delay to illustrate these three types of analyses. Interwoven with the analyses are suggestions for ways in which studies in early intervention could be extended by considering different approaches to examining qualitative data. This paper draws upon open-ended interviews with Latino parents of young children with mental retardation or developmental delay to demonstrate three different methods of ana-lyzing qualitative data: content, cultural mod-els, and narrative analyses. Each method sub-sumes a variety of techniques, but they differ from one another in terms of the angle or fo-cus of the analysis. Content analysis consists of techniques for reducing qualitative data (e.g., interviews, descriptive accounts of be-havior, images) to coded units or themes that can be further analyzed through quantitative methods (Bernard & Ryan, 1998). Cultural models analysis examines textual data for the underlying assumptions that speakers and their audiences share about various aspects of the world, such as beliefs about disability, health, and healing (Trotter & Schensul, 1998). Narrative analysis examines how peo-ple draw upon cultural and linguistic resourc-es to formulate stories that make sense of the flow of events in their lives (Riessman, 1993). Although content analysis is widely used i