You can also choose to apply multiple coding schemes to the same data, which means you can explore multiple ways of understanding the same data. Codes can be easily re-labeled, merged, or split.Qualitative software is not strictly necessary, though it does offer some advantages, like: Word or spreadsheet software) or work primarily with physical versions of your data. You may decide to use software to code your qualitative data, to re-purpose other software tools (e.g.

How will you apply your codes to your data? In practice, however, many practices will fall between these two approaches.

Or you my try to develop codes entirely from the data, ignoring as much as possible, previous knowledge of the topic under study, to develop a scheme grounded in your data (inductive). Where will your codes come from?ĭepending on your methodology, your coding scheme may come from previous research and be applied to your data (deductive). What aspects of your data will you code? If you are not coding all of your available data, how will you decide which elements need to be coded? If you have recordings interviews or focus groups, or other types of multimedia data, will you create transcripts to analyze and code? Or will you code the media itself (see Farley, Duppong & Aitken, 2020 on direct coding of audio recordings rather than transcripts). Some questions to consider as you decide how to code your data: What will you code? But there are rarely step-by-step descriptions, and you'll have to make many decisions about how to code for your own project. How you decide to code - or whether to code- your data should be driven by your methodology. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & AccessibilityĬoding is a qualitative data analysis strategy in which some aspect of the data is assigned a descriptive label that allows the researcher to identify related content across the data.

Coding in nvivo 12 for mac