What is Coding In the Context of Qualitative Data Analysis?

"In social research, coding simply means making and applying categories to your data. You can use your code to develop comparisons and connect your data to relevant theoretical concepts you've located in your literature review. Taken together, these codes, comparisons, and concepts help you build explanations that address your research questions." [source]

NVivo

NVivo is a data analysis software that helps organize & analyze unstructured data. Unlock insights in your data with the best qualitative data analysis software

NVivo at UVic

Taguette

Taguette is a free and open-source tool for qualitative research. You can import your research materials, highlight and tag quotes, and export the results

The UVic Libraries' Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC) offers free training for NVivo and Taguette.

Check the DSC calendar to see if these courses are in the upcoming schedule

Complete the workshops on your own time with the following links

Basic NVivo Workshop Description

NVivo is software that runs locally on researchers’ computers and helps them organize and analyze non-numerical or unstructured data. In this introductory workshop, participants will learn about the uses and benefits of working with qualitative data analysis software, how to navigate the NVIVO workspace, and how to import and export data. Using sample materials, participants will gain hands-on experience creating codes, nodes, and queries... read more.

Advanced NVivo Workshop Description

In this advanced workshop you will be introduced to creating cases and classifying them using NVivo. Generally, you can use cases classifications to record information about your study subjects, which can be people, institutions, places, among others. Case classifications allows you to include demographic information about the ‘units of analysis’ in your project. This workshop is ideal for those with previous knowledge working with NVivo who want to explore more possibility using the software... read more.

Taguette Workshop Description

Taguette is a user-friendly and free web-based tool that helps researchers to code and analyse their qualitative data. Taguette is a great tool for those who need to analyze interviews, reports, transcripts of any kinds, and a variety of text. With the tool, we can create codes and analyse texts easily and export in different file formats. If you have some or a lot of text to analyse, Taguette might be a great option for you... read more.

On This Page

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Bar Chart

For code or respondent counts

As a very basic overview, use a bar chart to show the number of times a theme was coded, or how many respondents mentioned a theme under a code.

Are your codes nested? Try one of these layouts:

Scoring Themes/ Matrix

Boyatzis’ approach to analyze qualitative data involves the techniques of scoring, clustering and scaling themes [source]

Thematic analysis: We want to see the relationship between certain code in contexts of other codes
Cross-case analysis: After coding the data of each case, we ran a matrix coding query to cross tabulate all cases as rows and all codes and variables as columns
With or without heat map

NVIVO: In the Navigation View, go to Search > Queries folder > sub folder Thematic analysis. Run the query Matrix coding query - images x contexts.

With heat map
without heat map

Example of: relationship between certain code in contexts of other codes

Example of: cross tabulate all cases as rows and all codes and variables as columns

Multiple Correspondence Analysis

Used for cross-case analysis QDA

Uses the output of the matrix with cases as rows and codes and variables as columns.

Coding Resources:

"MCA - Multiple Correspondence Analysis in R: Essentials" on Statistical tools for highthroughput data analysis (STHDA)

"Multiple Correspondence Analysis" by napsterinblue on GitHub

"Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in Excel" on XLSTAT

Network/ Relationship Maps

Network maps show the connections and relationships between ideas, people, or other qualitative concepts. The following visualization types are network maps, so focus more on the relationship between qualitative elements and less on the quantitative.

Code Mind Map

A mind map is a visual representation that shows a central concept surrounded by connected branches of associated topics (AKA codes, themes, tags). You can use it to show the hierarchy/ relationship between the codes you used to tag your data.

NVivo
Visio

Mind Maps in NVivo 12 for windows

Mind Maps in NVivo 11 for Mac

Organizational Chart in Visio (hierarchy chart)

Clustering Themes

Cluster analysis is an exploratory technique that you can use to visualize patterns in your project by grouping sources or nodes that share similar words, similar attribute values, or are coded similarly by nodes. Cluster analysis diagrams provide a graphical representation of sources or nodes to make it easy to see similarities and differences. Sources or nodes in the cluster analysis diagram that appear close together are more similar than those that are far apart. More on cluster analysis.

You can use cluster analysis diagrams to visualize:

The similarities and differences across your sources—for example, how similar are the submissions from the various community members?
The similarities and differences across your nodes—for example, how similar is the coding at rising sea levels, flood control, soil erosion, and land reclamation?
The demographic spread of your survey respondents based on attribute value.