Authors of this page:Dawn Clarke and Graham R. Gibbs
Affiliation: University of Huddersfield
Date written: 27th November 2008
- Learn how large the sections of text that are to be coded need to be
- Understand that the same passages can be coded to more than one code.
- Learn to leave wide margins and space between lines on transcripts so there is room to make notes about coding.
- Learn when definitions of codes are necessary.
Coding is a fundamental process in many different approaches to qualitative analysis, yet many novice researchers find it both hard to code the data and even harder to develop new codes from the data. Originally coding was done as a way of making it easy to bring together all the passages from different cases that were, in some sense, about the same thing. Relevant passages of text were marked with codes and then it was relatively simple to gather together - to retreive - all the passages that had been coded in the same way. Coding involves reading the text and this close reading can also be used as an opportunity to develop new codes that can be used in the template.
The resources on this site by Graham R Gibbs, Dawn Clarke, Celia Taylor, Christina Silver and Ann Lewins are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.