Discussion: coding, categories, and themes | RSCH 8310 – Qualitative Reasoning and Analysis | Walden University

PLEASES BE FAMILIAR WITH CODING AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND USE REQUIRED READINGS AND CITATIONS. THANK YOU

Required Readings

Saldaña, J. (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 6, “After Second Cycle Coding” (pp. 273–289)

Ravitch, S. M., & Carl, N. M. (2016). Qualitative research: Bridging the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 8, “Methods and Processes of Data Analysis” (pp. 237–270) (previously read in Weeks 5, 6, 7, and 8)

Chapter 9, “Writing and Representing Inquiry: The Research Report” (pp. 271–297)

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 12, “Data Analysis in the Responsive Interviewing Model” (pp. 189–211) (previously read in Weeks 5, 6, 7, and 8)

Walden University Library. (n.d.). Course guide and assignment help for RSCH 8310. Retrieved from http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/rsch8310

Use this website to search for books, encyclopedias, and articles based on the requirements for the Discussion and/or Assignment.

Required Media

Laureate Education (Producer). (2016).Visualizing data with Word or Excel [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Note: The approximate length of this media piece is 6 minutes.

In this media program, Dr. Susan Marcus, Core Research Faculty with the School of Psychology at Walden University, demonstrates how to visualize data using Microsoft Word or Excel.

Qualitative researchers approach data collection with an appreciation of the data sources (the participants, documents, etc.) as the key to understanding the phenomenon of interest. The same is true for data analysis. The researcher chooses an approach or approaches in order to systematically move through the words and images to identify codes, categories and themes that will reflect the sources’ experience.

A code is a word or short phrase that assigns an attribute, idea, or quality to a portion of text or visual data.

A category is a collection of these codes that share attributes, meaning, and/or intent. It is also labeled with a word or short phrase.

A theme is developed from one or more categories and can represent a “manifest” (directly observable) or “latent” (underlying) aspect of the phenomenon.

For this Discussion, you will examine coding, categories, and themes in your qualitative data you previously collected.

To prepare for this Discussion:

Review Chapter 8 of the Ravitch and Carl text and Chapter 12 of the Rubin and Rubin text and consider the differences in coding, categories, and themes.

Use the Course Guide and Assignment Help found in this week’s Learning Resources to search for books, encyclopedias and articles related to coding, categories, and themes in qualitative research.

Review your coding of your phone interview transcript. Identify two or more codes that could be grouped into a category. Next, identify samples of text you chose to define the codes.

Do the same for one of the Scholars of Change videos that you coded.

Consider if you can detect a theme emerging from your data analysis process. If you can identify a theme, name and describe it. If you cannot, consider why this is the case.

Post an explanation of the differences between codes, categories, and themes. Provide examples from your work. Use your Learning Resources and the article you found to support your explanation.

Be sure to support your main post and response post with reference to the week’s Learning Resources and other scholarly evidence in APA style.

LINK TO VIDEO OR USE TRANSCRIPT;

Microsoft Word – WAL_RSCH8310_vd_programtranscript_EN.docx

Visualizing Data with WORD or EXCEL

Visualizing Data with WORD or EXCEL

Program Transcript

SUSAN MARCUS: Hi. This is Dr. Susan Marcus. And in this video, we’ll be covering how to take the data that you coded and move it into categories and themes for presentation in visual and descriptive forms.

This document contains all of the coding work that we’ve done– our first cycle descriptive codes, our first cycle concept codes, and our second cycle pattern codes. We take each column of codes and put them into a Word document one right after the other. So it looks like this.

So here we are in this document where we have a list of all of our individual codes. And as a qualitative researcher, before you proceed, you want to check to make sure with your memo notes and your Excel spreadsheets that the meaning of each of these codes is clear to you. Once you do that, then you spend some time reading through each of the codes. Again, checking to see that you understand, you recall, how you came to that particular code, and if it actually reflects what the interviewee said when you were coding that bit of information.

Once that’s done, you’ll start to see some commonalities among those different codes. So for example, as I’m scrolling through, I see that several of the codes are about doing something for others. So I’ll use the Highlighting tool to identify codes that talk about how other people are affected or the intention to connect or do something for others. So some of these I’m being a bit elastic in my thinking. And I would check here “at my child’s school.” That’s certainly about helping others. But I would go back and check to make sure that what I’m interpreting is, in fact, connected to the data.

And you see how I am looking up and down and just checking to see is there anything else. Here’s another one, “helping others.” So of all these lists of codes, this has the potential to be a category or a theme. And I would go through the list several times and see if I could come up similar groupings of categories that may reflect different themes. So what I have here on this document is the result of going through that process and looking through that list over and over again and referring again back to my coding sheets and even back to the transcripts in order to come up with these themes, which summarize what our interviewees say about the meaning of social change as graduate students at Walden University. So here, you can now see that in the beginning, we moved away from what we were trying to identify or enquire into. And now as we come back to the analysis of the data to identify themes, we now think about, so what are we trying to do in the first place? And that is, exploring the concept of social change. And these are the themes that came out– a focus on the other, focus on local, responding to

© 2016 Laureate Education, Inc.