![]() ![]() You will develop a storyline around your core category and the relation to other categories. In this stage you connect the categories to find patterns and connections between codes and categories. cases, participants, documents) on certain underexposed concepts. When you are still creating new codes when analysing your data, you can use theoretical sampling to gather new data (e.g. ![]() This coding process will tell you when you have reached the point of “saturation”, the point when new data will not give you any new codes (information). In this stage, you will group your codes into categories. With every new piece of data, you consider whether you could code that new piece of data with your existing codes (constant comparison). You start by describing useful pieces of data with labels (in vivo coding), where you derive codes from the data itself. There are different ways to code your data, but the most common way of coding in a qualitative manner consists of the following three stages: In that case you can code your content in a qualitative manner. This is usually the case if you do not know the specific variables yet, but want to learn more about how something works or why something works that way – for example why your interview participants feel a certain way or how courts motivate certain decisions. If you are interested in more qualitative information (why/how-questions), you need to code your content in a different manner. When you have coded all your data, you can use SPSS to see whether there are certain relationships between the variables. ![]() You can use an excel file and state ‘1’ if the variable occurs and ‘0’ if the variable does not occur in the piece of data. When you know what variables you are interested in, you can see whether that variable occurs in the piece of data (e.g., an interview or a court case). When coding your content in a quantitative manner, it is important to operationalize your variables beforehand. In that case you can consider using quantitative content coding. Or you might be interested in relationships (correlations) between certain factors – for example whether a certain legal argument from a defendant correlates with a certain outcome of that court case. For some research questions you might be interested to learn about numbers, because you already know what variables you are investigating: for example, how many of your interview participants experience a certain phenomenon or how many court cases use the same legal arguments. You can code your content in a qualitative or a quantitative manner. In this entry, we will focus on analyzing written documents such as interview transcripts or court cases, but you can also use content coding to analyze other communicative expressions such as speeches, videos and media content. Alternatively, you can select the corresponding symbol in the toolbar in the upper right corner or hover over a code and click on the green plus symbol that automatically appears.Content coding is a method to systematically analyze pieces of information. So, how can codes be created? Simply right-click the root of the Code System in the Code System window and choose the option New code from the context menu. Only its context or framing will shed light on that. From simply looking at the code itself, its role in the research process is not always clear: it could be of minor importance or play a key role. In social research, codes can possess different meanings and take on different functions in the research process: there are factual codes, thematic codes, theoretical codes and many more (see Kuckartz 2018, Richards 2014). In technical terms, a code is a character string that can consist of up to 63 characters in MAXQDA, be it several words or more cryptical strings like “CR128”. Both associations are misleading! In the context of qualitative research a code is more of a label used to name phenomena in a text or an image. So, what is a code then? Your first associations may be of secret services and their coding and decoding machines, or of codes as strictly regulated mappings as in Morse codes. This is principally the same as tagging contents, but coding in empirical social research includes much more than that. But what does this mean? Coding describes the process of selecting part of the data material, for example a paragraph or one part of an image, with the mouse (just like in Word or other programs) and assigning a code to it. As we learned earlier, the central work technique among most analysis methods is Coding the data. ![]()
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