Beginners guide to coding qualitative data - YouTube

What is coding of qualitative data? Well coding is method used to analyze

data by identifying themes or codes that appear in our qualitative data and then

assigning intersections of data to those codes. Miles and Huberman state that

codes are tags or labels for assigning units of meaning codes are usually

attached to chunks of varying size. Those might be words, phrases, sentences or even

whole paragraphs. The process is to break up very long and detailed qualitative

data, like interviews, focus groups and documents into common themes. We can

then read across different sources to compare what people are saying on one

particular issue or topic. For example we might have a code called healthy eating

and we can compare what different groups of people have said about healthy eating.

So for example we might see whether older people were more into healthy

eating than younger people or what different ideas people had about what

healthy eating is and coding is like putting things into categories once

we've created our categories and sorted things into them it's easier to find

things later and see how items in one cattle vary it's partly a method for

analysis but also a way of managing your data once you've been through encoded

your data it can be a lot easier to do the writing up later because it makes it

easy to quickly find a quote to support something that you want to say so let's

do a little bit of coding here and see how that works so we've got an example

data source of someone being interviewed about what they eat for breakfast and

they say I'm a single mom with an eight-year-old toddler and breakfast is

Mayhem baby has porridge i microwave up some ready break with whole milk for him

so I've created a couple of codes here of things I think might come up

you see we've already got one here for porridge so I'm gonna select this text

about being about porridge and drag and drop it onto the porridge theme so we've

coded that section of text now to that theme we could have chosen the whole

paragraph or a larger piece of text or just this section here about porridge

but we chose the whole sentence and we can also say that this whole sentence is

also about milk so we can drag that onto the milk purple here as well and we've

now coded this text to be about milk and about porridge and that's the basics

of coding going through creating codes coding sections of text of those codes

now the kind of coding we're doing here is very basic and descriptive for

example here I'm a single mom with eight-year-old and toddler browses

mayhem well let's put this on to the children's bubble here because actually

I think that's about children but you've seen we've got some other themes here so

we can say that this is also about family structure it's about wider issues

about social breakdown there's also about time so these are things that

might come up and we also might want to do some kind of in vivo coding

questionably about mayhem and we may want to even create a theme here which

is called mayhem so various different ways that we can code up the data you

see even these this very simple sentence these couple of sentences here we've

managed to code in a whole bunch of different ways so it can be a very long

process of going through and doing coding but this is the basics of how it

looks broad and clark described codes as being a pithy label identifying what's

of interest in the data while themes are an idea or concept making a common

recurring pattern across a data set clustered around a central organizing

concept so in our example here low-fat yogurt might be a code and healthy

eating would be something it will be more like a theme so there are many

different types of coding from the two big kind of types are grounded theory or

emergent coding and that's pretty much where you start with just a blank sheet

so you have no preconceptions of what you're going to find in the data you're

completely open to having the data speak to you and just as you go through

on-the-fly reading through the data defining the codes and themes that the

data is suggesting to you the other method is called framework analysis or

structured coding where you actually have a framework so you've got your list

of codes and themes beforehand and what you're trying to do is match the data to

the codes that you've already identified so the topics of interest you already

want to look for in the data now in practice what most people do

is something which is a little bit of a flexible combination between both they

have some kind of idea of the things they want to find in the data but

they're also open to new things so if there's something surprising and

unexpected coming out of the data they can create new codes and themes to

capture that there are also a lots of different types of coding which we can

use the most common is called descriptive coding and it's about

literally coding what's being discussed in a very literal basis so if somebody

says I like yogurt you code yogurt and like there's also thematic coding where

you create themes and codes we taught that a little bit already you can do

line by line coding and that's where you assign each line is own code kind of

describing what's going on in that one line or sentence

there's also IPA interpreted phenomenological analysis and that's

about looking to see how participants experience and make meaning of things

that are happening in their world and that's often combined with a line by

line coding approach there's also in vivo coding and that's where you use

actually the words in terms that participants in the data are using to

develop code so if somebody says I really love breakfast it's my favorite

meal of the day love would be with the word that you pull out there so you're

using their own words to categorize that what they're saying

there's also discourse analysis where we look at how people express themselves

what types of words do people use how to P different people express themselves

and there's many more different ways that we can analyze and explore data

that there's a whole text book by Johnny Saldana which is really excellent to

read on coding qualitative data and I think it is 34 different ways that you

can code data and it can really help with your kind of stuck you've tried a

coding approach and it's not quite working for you go back and try a

completely different approach do it from a kind of action viewpoint or process

viewpoint it's important to remember that coding is nearly always an

iterative cyclical process you go back and do it again and again over and over

so you're reading it through multiple times you're doing different levels

different types of coding and also going through and

coding your coding so trying to put your codes and themes into different groups

different structures different ways to to pull together the different themes

which are coming out from the data coding is an important part of analysis

but it also requires further interpretation when it's complete you

still need to say well what does my coded data say you need to go through

and read it and all these different methods are really just different ways

of getting to know your data better they're not going to do the analysis and

interpretation for you but they're an important step in the process it's also

important to bear in mind that you don't have to do any coding a lot of people

don't like doing coding a lot of practitioners say that it abstracts

people from the data is a very reductive process you're taking very long very

detailed complex nuanced data and extracting it a very kind of low level

kind of very base level of analysis so some people just advocate just reading

the data over and over until it makes sense in your head now there are lots of

software tools like Quercus that will help you code qualitative data but you

don't have to use any special software a lot of people use spreadsheets we use

something like Excel to go through and do line by line coding and put different

themes for those or in word processors in Word just use the comments feature a

lot of people also just use pen and paper so they'll print out the

transcripts use different colored highlighters to identify different

themes and some people even cut out the sentence cities or paragraphs put them

into different envelopes or folders and group them together by the different

themes these are all ways that you can use to get to know your data better and

start to sort and organize it but the dedicated software does make it a lot

easier when you come through to write up to find those quotes especially compared

to doing it on paper and know where they came from so if you want to see

everything encoded on healthy eating on all the quality of software packages

that's just a click away quad course is just one of the ways that

you can use to analyze your data it's very visual very intuitive and easy to

use and you can go to our website and download a complete free trial

and see how it works for you