Overview:
The development of a coding guide helps to ensure validity when you are analyzing unstructured data.
- A coding guide is a document in which you keep details about how you are categorizing your text.
- There are many different ways to categorize unstructured data, so a coding guide helps to keep everyone on the same page so that your results are meaningful.
- To be useful, a coding guide should include as much detail as possible and should be tested via different members of the research team.
- That is, once the coding guide is created, it should be given to a second or third coder who uses the guide to analyse the data.
- Once the data has been coded by multiple people using the guide, results should be compared and the guide modified if necessary so that everyone has the same understanding of what the categories mean.
- This process: guide development-testing-iteration may run for a few cycles so the codes and coding guide can be strengthened. Ensure you allow adequate time.
What is a code? This helpful video from Mod-U helps to explain codes (3.5 mins):
How to Develop a Coding Guide: Three Ways:
- In developing the guide, the research lead can approach the task in three different ways:
- Deductively: Codes are developed prior to reading the data, they arise based on what one expects to find after reading the literature or applied knowledge that has been gained prior to the collection of data. Codes are refined with the team using the data to ensure codes are clear, but no new codes are developed after data collection.
- Inductively: The data is collected prior to the development of the coding guide. The research lead(s) read through the data several times to identify patterns, then the patterns lead to categories which go in the coding guide. This requires less time and effort prior to data collection but requires a greater allocation of time and effort after data collection. It is also important in inductive theming or coding to write memos as you go along and keep these up to date. These memos help you to remember your process when coding, and will allow for a rigorous defense of your coding guide.
- A combination of inductively and deductively: In this case the coding guide is partially or mostly developed out of the knowledge of the literature or the applied knowledge gained prior to data collection, but coders are also on the lookout for additional categories or patterns that they add to the guide as they go.
- The way the coding guide is developed (Deductively or inductively) loosely follows the different types of qualitative theming (deductive or inductive) which will be discussed in greater detail in the following section.
For more details, see this SlideShare Presentation from Heather Ford at the Oxford Internet Institute: