Chapter 19. Advanced Codes and Coding
Introduction: Forest and Trees
Chapter 17 introduced you to content analysis, a particular way of analyzing historical artifacts, media, and other such “content” for its communicative aspects. Chapter 18 introduced you to the more general process of data analysis for qualitative research, how you would go about beginning to organize, simplify, and code interview transcripts and fieldnotes. This chapter takes you a bit deeper into the specifics of codes and how to use them, particularly the later stages of coding, in which our codes are refined, simplified, combined, and organized for the purpose of identifying what it all means, theoretically. These later rounds of coding are essential to getting the most out of the data we’ve collected. By the end of the chapter, you should understand how “findings” are actually found.
I am going to use a particular analogy throughout this chapter, that of the relationship between the forest and trees. You know the saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees”? Think about what this actually means. One is so focused on individual trees that one neglects to notice the overall system of which the trees are a part. This is something beginning researchers do all the time, and the laborious process of coding can make this tendency worse. You focus on the details of your codes but forget that they are merely the first step in the analysis process, that after you have tagged your trees, you need to step back and look at the big picture that is the entire forest. Keep this metaphor in mind. We will come back to it a few times.
Let’s imagine you have interviewed fifty college students about their experiences during the pandemic, both as students and as workers. Each of these interviews has been transcribed and runs to about 35 pages, double-spaced. That is 1,750 pages of data you will need to code before you can properly begin to make sense of it all. Taking a sample of the interviews for a first round of coding (see chapter 17), you are likely to first note things that are common to the interviews. A general feeling of fear, anxiety, or frustration may jump out at you. There is something about the human brain that is primed to look for “the one common story” at the outset. Often, we are wrong about this. The process of coding and recoding and memoing will often show us that our initial takes on “what the data say” are seriously misleading for a couple of reasons: first, because voices or stories that counter the predominant theme are often ignored in the first round, and, second, because what startles us or surprises us can drive away the more mundane findings that actually are at the heart of what the data are saying. If we have experienced the pandemic with little anxiety, seeing anxiety in the interviews will surprise us and make us overstate its importance in general. If we expect to find something and we see something very different, we tend to overnotice that difference. Thi