Assignment #5 Coding Qualitative Data Assignment Instructions

CODING TEXT USING MICROSOFT WORD

CODING TEXT USING MICROSOFT WORD

Not all data that you will be using in your analysis will be numeric in nature. Some of it will be textual data. And so what I would like to show you in this video is how to use microsoft Word to code textual data. You might use this if you were coding transcripts. It could also be used to code a paper that you were reviewing or a book, or really any kind of textual information. And by coding, what I'm referring to is the act of going through a text document, looking for snippets of text that are relevant to the research you're doing and assigning them a code of your choosing some term that will help you to identify that text later. In the case of what we're doing here, I am going to show you a transcript that Oxford University has posted on the web of a student that they interviewed. And for purposes of this demonstration, I am interested in her biographical information. And so I'm going to be coding primarily for anything she tells us about her biography. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to double-click on our coding Microsoft Word template. This is a Macro Enabled template. The way I have my security settings set up in Microsoft Word, it warns me anytime that I tried to open a document where macros are allowed. Macros are small computer programs that are imbedded within Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel documents. These programs can be used for nefarious purposes, like infecting your computer with the virus. And so some workplaces will have the settings by default in Microsoft Word sets so that you cannot open a document that contains a macro. However, macros often contain programs that are very helpful, such as the one we're going to use today. The important thing is before you actually open and run a macro on your computer, you need to consider where you got it from. Do you trust the source or do you have the knowledge of how to write macros that would allow you to evaluate the program and make sure that it is not doing something you don't want it to do, such as infect your computer with the virus. In this case, I have reviewed this macro and actually have made some changes to it. As I do know that it is a safe macros, I'm going to enable it. If for some reason you were in a school setting where macros were disabled by default, you can click on the File tab, go to Options on the Trust Center. Down here at the bottom, you can click Trust Center Settings and here will be your options for macros. I do not recommend disable without notification because that will just never allow you to open one and will never tell you why. So I always use disable with notification, which gives you the option of enabling it. I don't recommend enable all macros either because this never gives you a warning. And any macro that you might run across with load and run without your permission. So to me, this is the most useful setting because it gives you the choice, but doesn't just do it automatically. So you click that one and you click Okay, and Okay again, and it'll bring you back to the document. Returning to our example, we have a transcript from Oxford University and we want to code this. This is a PDF file. It could also be another Microsoft Word document. It could be a text document that contained absolutely no formatting of any kind. If you press Ctrl A, it will highlight the entire text. And then if you do Control C, that will copy the text. I could just as easily have right-clicked on the document, click and select it all, and then right-click again and done copy. Either one would work. Then go back to our document and go to Paste. I prefer paste special paste text only because this will get rid of any special formatting that might have been in the PDF file. And it will look a lot better and be a lot easier to work with. Okay, Again, we're interested primarily in how we can look for the biography of this woman. So as we go through the text, we will see that she's lived her whole life and Australia with her parents. So if you highlight that and go to the Review tab and say new comment. And I'm going to give this a code of bio. This is a code completely of my choosing. Codes should be meaningful to you because you're the one that's going to be using them. So bio is just a way of categorizing the texts that we're looking at. She was born in Tasmania. Again, that's a bio. But let's say that I was also interested in recording information about her birth. I can highlight this again, create a second comment and call it birth. But you want to make sure that you only put one category in each comment. So you do not want to put bio and birth in the same comment. You want the code them separately. And as we continue to scroll down, we're going to see that she went to school in Japan. And so we will code this one with bio as well. But I'm going to also code this for schooling. Finally, we will notice as we go through this that she went to school in Tokyo. Okay. This is just a very short example. You will note that so far I have put in three codes, bio, schooling and birth. And what I would like to do is pull those out into a separate document. So if we go to the View tab, go to Macros, few macros. And it's going to show us by default all of the macros in the system. So if we save this before we go to that, and we say here's our transcript. And then we go to View Macros. It will show us the macro that is associated with our transcript document. And if we simply run this macro, it will say, do you want to extract all comments to a new document? Yes, we do. And it will create for us a document of new document. Notice it no longer has transcript at the top. It has document to that contains the page and line number where the text appears. The text itself, the code, the person who coded the text, and the date that it was done. We can then save this. If we want to coded text and we have it in a separate file, you'll notice that it gives you the location, the page, and the line number. If we go back over to the transcript, the line numbers aren't necessarily there. If you go to Page Layout, you will see under Page Setup an option for line numbers. And if you go to restart each page, it will actually put in a line number for you. So now, if we go to our coded text, we will see that on page two, line 6, we should see that this person lived their whole life in that city with their parents in Tasmania. So page to line 6. We go back to the transcript. We go to page two, lines six. And you can see, I lived here my whole life with my parents. And it's the starting line number because this carried over onto line 7, but it gives you the starting position on page two. And so you can actually find that particular piece of coded text in context. This also gives you the code that you used. And again, the coder, if two or three people were working on coding this document, each might see something different. You might want to go back and be able to discuss it with that person. And so it tells you who the coder is and the date that you did it. This puts it into a Word document for you, which is often fine. But let's say that you wanted to do something more elaborate with this. You'll see that this table has a little icon in the top left corner. If you right-click on that, it will select the entire table and give you the option to copy it. You then can go to Microsoft Excel and you can paste it. And this will paste your Microsoft Word documents table into Excel. If you highlight this by clicking the arrow in the top corner, stretch your, your rows and your columns out a little bit. Then come back and double-click on these lines. It will automatically adjust each column and row 2, the width of the text that's in those lines. And so it makes a little more readable. We don't have much here to really worry with. But if we were coding a large quantity of text, maybe from several documents, then this could be a really useful thing to do. Because now we can actually go in and on the Data tab in Excel. We can use Excel's filter command to actually go through and say we only want to look at the bio. And it will filter out our text, just bio. Another thing we could do is we can actually sort on the code. And it will group them all so that all of my bio codes are together. This is fine for small-scale research, like you might do in a class, or even a small project that a researcher might do. I do not recommend this for large-scale research. Things such as noticed an atlas TI are programs that are available commercially that do a much better job of this for large research projects. And so I only encourage this for smaller projects. But for most of the things that you're going to do in a graduate class, this is probably perfectly adequate.