Speaker 1: What does coding look like? Often people think that they need a sophisticated software to do coding, and in fact this is not true. Often sophisticated software is an advanced way of helping you manage your qualitative data, but you can very well code by hand. You can print things out and code by hand and do it the old-fashioned way. If your research questions and your data, the volume of data, the number of interviews you've done, or the number of pictures you have becomes quite large, that's one of the ways in which qualitative research software can be very helpful to help you manage that, but you can do it by hand. Coding can be scribbling on the paper. That is a way of taking notes to make summary statements about what's going on. You can use highlighters. That's a really effective way, for instance, of just getting a visual understanding of how things work. So your first pass at coding can be just taking notes on the page. Then your second pass of coding, when you're thinking about how do these codes work together, you might give certain codes a single color so that later when you're flipping through to say, I want to find the code emotion, or you want to find the category emotion, you're looking for all the codes, sad, happy, disgruntled. You've coded them all blue. You've colored them all blue so that you don't have to go back and read everything at that level. You can just visually find everything blue and how it works together. So again, every step from the coding process to the write-up process is moving from the most in-depth and then back out to the biggest theoretical. So visual cues about how things fit together are very effective in helping you organize your ideas and moving it towards write-up. If you are doing coding by hand, there are some key ways to do it effectively. If you're coding by hand, you want to make sure that you give sufficient space on your actual document to write on the document. So while it is not necessarily best practices in terms of ecological citizenship, you want to create large margins where you can write on the side, and you want to make sure that you at least double space so that you have space to write on the text what it is that you're noticing and what's happening, and then to write again about that process. There's a first pass where you're taking close notes, and your second pass where you're making notes about your notes. You're moving from codes to categories. How do your codes work together? Another thing that you might think about using beyond highlighters, which gives you a good visual guide to your data, is colored sticky notes. And this is because if you have a stack of documents and you know that you've coded emotion blue, you can have colored sticky notes on every page where you need to go back and find that information. So that becomes very useful as well as a way for you to quickly access your data. Often when we think about qualitative research, we want to think about how are we being, how are you being valid? How do we know that our research is valid? How do we know that it is reliable? Through the process of data collection, we use the concept of saturation to essentially assert that we have done sufficient amount of work collecting data. But your reliability and validity of your research also depend on the extent to which you are thorough in your coding exercises. So you code for analytical clarity, you're coding for rigor and thoroughness. It's not about just doing interviews and then sort of taking one pass at the interviews and writing up. People do do that, but ostensibly the coding process is something that you go through multiple times in order to ensure that what you code on the first interview makes sense when you get to your 50th interview. So often you'll do your first pass coding through your first five interviews and realize by your sixth interview you might need to go back to those first five interviews and code them slightly differently because you're realizing that themes are emerging as you're coding. So there's a rigor and a thoroughness to your coding that it's good to attend to in order to be as honest and reliable and valid with your process. And transparent. Transparency is also a really important concept in qualitative work. Take notes about your coding process so that when people ask you how do you know what you know, you can say in my first pass I used these codes and then after my second pass I went through and collapsed these codes into these codes. It is as important coding and rigor in your coding process is as important as attending to saturation in your data collection process. And we code for theoretical intervention. So coding is the process of moving from small-scale observation to big-scale intervention. How do these small-scale observations accrue to broader understandings and explanations of what happens in the social world?