Assignment #5 Coding Qualitative Data Assignment Instructions

QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS-CODING & DEVELOPING THEMES

QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS-CODING & DEVELOPING THEMES

Coding should really only be done when the researcher is fully familiar with the data that he or she has gathered. But coding is actually quite straightforward in that it's about labeling sections or passages of text with a code word or code words. Encoding is about identifying within the text. Interesting or salient features of the data relate to the research questions or research objectives. Now coating can be done at a fairly basic level, what we call a manifest level, whereby you are looking at the words that are in front of you and coding based on the words that are, have been transcribed, for example. More latent level coding is why researchers are using their own judgments. And I'm views and perhaps reading between the lines of what's been said within the data. Now that is obviously a more complex process than simply coding. At a manifest level. That should practicalities of coding is really from my experience, is using highlighter pens, colored pens, and post-it notes. It's actually a very tactile experience and it's about getting more and more familiar with the data that's in front of view. The idea is to go through the entire datasets and code that material. And you can have multiple codes for the same segment of text as you'll see from the next example. This is a practical example of coding. This is come from my data. Now, the actual content of what's in front is irrelevant. Rather, I want to show you what coding looks like in reality. So this is an extract from a transcript as part of one of my research studies. Now the process of coding, as I've mentioned, is about highlighting interesting or salient features of the data and providing that data with a code. So you can see here where I've highlighted parts of the texts that are of interest to my research questions. And on the right-hand side in the margin, I provided a code that represents features or meaning within that text. So this is what you're coding process should look like. Shove a long list of, of codes down the right-hand side of your transcript that relate to particular segments or passages of text within your transcript. The actual code that you use, I'd suggest keep them brief and succinct. So for example, I have here a code that's called low sickness, right? And you can see how that relates to the passage of text that's been highlighted. So try and keep your code's relatively short and succinct because that will help as you move through the qualitative data analysis process. You should now see in front of you a long list of codes that relate to the data that you've collected is about refocusing and refining your analysis by sorting your codes into some sort of order, onto some sort of grouping. So it's about thinking how your codes can be merged together and combine to form an overarching thematic category. So here's an example, again from my own research about how I derived the theme banger. Now, this related to some research that I did in prison. And bang opposite term that relates to prisoners being locked up in prison cell. Now the famed bang up with derived from the initial coding process, which you can see here on the left-hand side. So within the codes that I derived, there were a number that related to the process of prisoners being locked up in that prison cell. And you can see that been locked up time slowing down in the prison cell, worrying whilst in the prison cell, boredom in the prison cell. All of those clearly relate to being locked up and banged up. So I felt that as a result of those codes, I could group them together into this overall thematic category, which was called Bangla, which was really describing the loss of control that prisoners had washed them in a prison cell. So just to clarify, the initial coding process, derive the number of codes related to the experience of being locked in a prison cell. I then went through a process of grouping together those codes, which are similar in nature and derived a theme bandgap, which encapsulated. All of those codes. So if you can imagine the process of grouping together codes to create broad thematic categories, you can then start to consider how those themes themselves my interrelate and how themes may have different levels of hierarchies. So another way to think about themes and how they interlink and perhaps gray hierarchies and odors of thematic categories is to look at what jennifer, I tried Sterling cause thematic networks. Now I tried Sterling refers to basic themes, organizing themes and global themes. And again, I've used my data to try to illustrate what that looks like. So you remember the theme that was developed early in this presentation called backup and how that relates to prisoners been behind the prison cell and feeling kind of lack of control. Within my data. There were the themes that relate it to the sense of prisoners losing control. I won't go into detail about each of these themes. But as an example, prisoners felt as though they were being treated as children. And that had a very disempowering effect. So I created a thing called feeling infantilized. Now these themes are that tried Sterling calls and basic themes have something in common which I felt was the process of losing control. Now, losing control is what jennifer, I tried Sterling cause an organizing theme. So the organizing theme links together the basic themes. You can take this a step further and think about global themes and how they also interlink with organizing themes. So for my data, you can say I had several organizing themes that interlinked to create one global theme, which in this instance was called control. So thematic network may look something like this. Now again, this was for my own research and constituted a lot of qualitative data. But you can see how basic themes, organizing themes and the central global thing, interlink and relate. And that's the purpose of the thematic network to show those interrelationships between thematic areas. I think it's useful to share. What I see is some potential pitfalls that new researches experimented with. Qualitative research often face. The first one, which I see quite a lot, especially in student work, is endless quotations that I use. Pose, thematic idea. Now, simply listing quotes, undress. Somatic heading is not thematic analysis. Thematic analysis, of course, uses quotations to support the interpretation of the researcher. In my view, they should be used very sparingly. And instead, there should be more of an analytical commentary on the things that the research has developed. The second I'd make is that the data collection questions that you may use from interviews and focus groups are not themes, they are just questions. So the process of moving beyond simply the raw data that is gathered through the interview and a focus group to create thematic categories does take a lot of work. And often I see students trying to cut the corners of qualitative data analysis by simply using the data collection questions as heading for which they then discuss the answers to those questions. That's a very poor presentation of qualitative data analysis. The final point is that your analysis must be grounded in the original dataset. So you must be absolutely confident that the themes and ideas that you develop can be linked back to the original raw data. And that's really important because it shows a level of trustworthiness in the way that the data has been analyzed.