The Code

So the second I proclaimed that I finished something, I got sick. I wasn't serious! It was just a small little piece done. I refuse to be a martyr though; I take cold medicine every 4 hours and switch the the night time stuff around 11:00pm. I'm not messing around with this! I may or may not have taken a nap yesterday in my office, but you gotta do what you gotta do right?



I want to give a special thank you to Carla for spending hours with me this afternoon coding the interviews. Carla is amazing and if she decides to go to graduate school and/or do research in the future, she will do great things with it. I am so glad to have her, because I can't really talk about the data with anyone else. I can talk about big ideas, but no one can actually read the transcripts (and who would want to unless money was involved). It works better for me if I can talk things through and process what I am thinking about. Hence another reason why the blog is back. Even if I am talking to myself it is good. Continue reading if you want to know about my coding process, otherwise stop here. . .I won't be mad.



Really? You want to know? Okay! Today we worked on the 13 Educator interviews. I have spent the last few days doing in vivo (line by line) coding on hard copies of the transcripts. The point of in vivo coding is not to "look" for anything, but to just see what the data tell you. So, in the margins I write notes that are in the words of the speaker. From there, we create a list of codes that represent what was most salient across all thirteen interviews. We generated a list of aproximately 15 codes. Then to increase reliability, we both coded an interview together. We read through and decided which codes went with which pieces of text. We also had to add more codes that we had fogotten to capture all of the data. We did two interviews like this to be sure that we are clear on the definition of each code and what text should be assigned to each. (Some text and be coded multiple ways).



Now we move to the software. Now, some traditional qualitative researchers say that one should not use software for data analysis. It should all be done by hand with hi-lighters and scissors and pages and pages of paper. I disagree. I use HyperResarch which is a program developed my a professor at BC. Basically it is a tool that organizes the data, it doesn't actually do any analysis. It does allow me to select portions of text and assign codes, and then go back and look at one code and see all of the realated text from all of the interviews. This feature is invaluable in the writing. I recommend HyperResearch to anyone doing qualitative data analysis. You can also use photos, video, and sound in the program. I used it on my last study and found it to be amazing.



Now I am going to memo about each code to clearly define it for future reference. Tomororw I will start assigning the codes to the interviews.