Institute of Sociology
of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Voronina N.S. The experience of coding “on paper”, or How a researcher with a quantitative background learns to analyze interviews. In: Practices for analyzing qualitative data in the social sciences [Text]: textbook. allowance ...



Voronina N.S. The experience of coding “on paper”, or How a researcher with a quantitative background learns to analyze interviews. In: Practices for analyzing qualitative data in the social sciences [Text]: textbook. allowance / otv. ed. E. V. Polukhina; National research University Higher School of Economics. - M .: Ed. house of the Higher School of Economics, 2023. P. 121-141. ISBN 978-5-7598-2542-5 (reg.). - ISBN 978-5-7598-2497-8 (e-book).
ISBN 978-5-7598-2542-5

Posted on site: 06.02.23

 


Abstract

One of the interview analysis techniques is coding, which is based on the strategy of A. Strauss and J. Corbin. This procedure is divided into three stages: 1) open coding (open coding): search for categories and extraction of meanings; 2) axial coding: search for relationships between categories; 3) selective/selective coding: search for key categories. The first level of coding is simple, but the most time-consuming. At this stage, we are as close as possible to the data, we read quotes from the interview and highlight the main thoughts, tags. These highlighted main words or phrases need to be named somehow: they are usually called a code or a label. The words of the informant themselves sometimes act as codes. When highlighting codes, it is important not to lose the meaning that the informant brings to his statement. Two different people can say what is important for them, for example, self-development, so they volunteer. At the same time, they put a completely different meaning into it. For example, for one participant in the study, “volunteering is self-development, it’s doing something, not going to a bar to drink beer,” and for another, it’s “training in volunteer rescue courses in emergencies, traveling and learning foreign languages.” Our task in the course of open coding is to understand what meaning the informant puts into the code, which we called self-development. The second level, axial coding, is the search for relationships between codes obtained at the open coding stage. That is, we need to take all the selected codes and combine them into more general categories: combine the codes that are similar in meaning, which we received at the first stage, and come up with a common name for them that would correspond to the sociological category. At this stage of coding, a research background and theoretical erudition are just what is needed. I will give an example from my work, where there were such codes: “the importance of caring for nature”, “the desire for action”, “the desire for novelty”, “freedom of action”. I thought that all these codes can be attributed to values, i.e. the category “value motive” was obtained. How do I know what these values are? You can find such formulations of values, for example, in the method of measuring values by S. Schwartz [Karandashev, 2004]. The third, highest theoretical level of generalization is selective/selective coding. From the entire set of categories identified at the second stage, it is necessary to analytically build a central category, around which all the others are located. The resulting theory will be the result of the analysis.

Content (in russ)


↑