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Introduction to Coding

Introduction to Coding Program Transcript

SUSAN MARCUS: Hello. My name is Dr. Susan Marcus, and this is an introduction to coding qualitative data. Before we get started, I'm going to give you a definition and some visuals of what we mean by coding qualitative data. A code in qualitative inquiry is most often a word or a short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, a summary, a salient or essence-capturing attribute, for some portion of language, or visual data.

So what does that mean? With these certain words, short words or phrases, we're trying to capture a meaning that's been attributed to, or contributed to, by another source. So the process of coding means we identify distinctive features of a piece of text, and see if there are similar features to other pieces of text from other sources.

What this also means is you can code just about anything. You can code transcripts from videos. You can code transcripts from written, or phone, or live, interviews. You can also code observations of a field experience. Or code observations of a photo.

So once you get anything that you have observed, and want to include, in your qualitative data analysis into a language-based form, typically in the form of a transcript in a word processing document, you can then start the process of coding. What we're doing is we're looking for patterns, similarities in features, similarities in order of presentation, similarities of context, similarities in meaning.

So what these marbles represent are the different thoughts, and feelings, and experiences, each person has about being in nature. And my quest as a qualitative researcher to see if I can understand each individual's experience, and then look for shared meaning across those experiences. So here's person A. And each type of experience they share is noted by a different marble.

And as a qualitative researcher beginning to code, I say, hmm, maybe I can first organize them according to a distinctive feature. Let's try color. And as I'm organizing the marbles, I see, well, some of the colors are really distinct, and some of them are not quite as distinct as I thought. But I'm going to group them together anyway. So in a sense, I've created a code for this person according to color.

Now I'm going to do it with the next person's-- marble's-- experiences. And I'm going to organize them and sort them so that they line up with, to the best that I can surmise, the preceding person. And I'll do the same for the other two individuals. And as I'm doing this, I'm also reflecting in my mind-- but if I was doing this as a qualitative study, I would be taking notes, writing memos-- about the choices I was making about where to group, or where to put, which marble with which group.

So, obviously, color is a really easy way to sort. We could sort on size. We could sort on clarity. We could sort on whether some of the marbles were colored, or solid, or cat's eyes. And voila. So I've sorted, I've coded each individual's experiences by color. And

Introduction to Coding

now, as a qualitative researcher, I want to group these experiences-- and again, we'll do it by color just for the purposes of illustration-- into larger patterns to see if there are similarities across these different individuals.

And one of the things, for example, I would note, is that while most of the group share this experience, indicated by the red marbles in color, this person has a similar kind of experience, but it's not quite the same. So as a qualitative researcher, I would make a note-- I'm grouping these codes together into a category that I could call red. Noting that some of the codes are approximations, but not identical, to the final category. And then I can do that with the other marbles as well.

So again, you can see that I have made groups of like objects some of them-- Oh, here's another. Look at this. I had one set of objects over here, but they actually can go over here. And I also have a couple of discrepancies that don't really fit in any particular category. And so as a qualitative researcher, I also have to make a decision. Do I want to force, or try and make, every bit of information fit into a category, or do I want to use these as what we call discrepant cases, to explore what these individual items or codes mean?

So I hope that helps illustrate what we mean by the process of coding. Taking individual bits of information, grouping them. I could also try grouping them with another approach. For example, some of these marbles have two different colors. So I could also see what pattern emerges if I take marbles with two different colors and put them all in one group. And marbles with single colors and another group. Looks different.

So that's the idea of approaching coding from different perspectives. That is, if you code just one way, you get one picture. But if you code taking another approach, you may get an entirely different picture.

The other point I'd like to share with you is the choice of doing manual coding. What we mean by manual coding is using basic word processing and spreadsheet tools to move bits of data around in order to create codes, categories, and themes.

The other alternative, is computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. There are many, many choices available. And of course, the advantage of using a computer application is that you have a bit more efficiency. They have lots of great visual displays, and other ways to manipulate data. The challenge is, most of these software programs have a very steep learning curve. So you're learning both how to code qualitative data and learning a software program.

The other issue is that because there are so many different kinds of programs to choose from, you, as you become a more experienced qualitative researcher, and if you choose to go on and do a qualitative dissertation, you may, after looking at different programs, develop your own preference. Or your chair may have a preference for which one to use. You'll have a chance to work with smaller data sets in this course, and so using

Introduction to Coding

Excel and Word are more than acceptable. And, towards the end of the course, you'll also have a chance to explore software alternatives.

The other thing you'll need to do is create a notebook. It can be in electronic form, like a Word document, or an actual notebook for handwriting notes. In qualitative research, we call these memos. Which contain your reflections, your thoughts, your descriptions of your process, of going from the data sources, the transcripts, to codes, to categories, and writing up your results.

As a final note, I just want to encourage you to use this as an opportunity to explore, and develop new skills, and consider whether or not this type of research is something that you would like to pursue for your dissertation. The act of qualitative data analysis can be laborious, intensive, and repetitive. But it's also the opportunity for discovery, for something new, that's been generated by your participants, for the data that you've collected, and perhaps even the opportunity to discover something about yourself.