The Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data

After conducting an interview, transcription will allow you to take the contents of the interview and effectively analyse it. Coding interviews requires a transcript. You can transcribe with varying levels of specificity, and utilize various methods from doing it manually, with auto-transcription software, or by outsourcing to transcription services. 

When transcribing, choose the type of transcription you want to do, then listen to audio and type out the transcription while designating who the speaker is, a timestamp, and the dialogue contents of the transcription. These transcriptions are the first step for coding interviews.

Types of transcriptions

• Verbatim transcription: Transcribing every word, pause, stutter, and filler words, such as “ahs” and “ums”. 

• Intelligent transcription: Transcribing every word, but making an interpretation to exclude pauses, status, and filler words and potentially cleaning up the grammar.

• Edited transcription: An edited transcript is common if you plan to publish the transcript for an audience. It’s cleaned up and edited to increase readability and clarity. You can edit grammar, remove run-on sentences, and potentially summarize parts for the sake of clarity. 

Learn more about how to transcribe interviews.

What is qualitative coding?

Qualitative coding is a process of systematically categorizing excerpts in your qualitative data in order to find themes and patterns.

It enables you to take unstructured or semi-structured data such as transcripts from in-depth interviews or focus groups and structure it into themes and patterns for analysis.

Coding your qualitative data makes your analysis more systematic and rigorous. It also provides transparency and reflexivity to both yourself and others.

It’ll enable you to find insights that are truly representative of your data and the human stories behind them.

Benefits of qualitative coding

• Increase validity: Qualitative coding provides organization and structure to data so that you can examine it in a systematic way to increase the validity of your analysis.

• Decrease bias: Qualitative coding enables you to be aware of potential biases in the way data is analyzed.

• Accurately represent participants: Qualitative coding allows you to evaluate if your analysis represents your participant base, and helps you avoid over representing one person or group of people.

• Enable transparency: Qualitative coding enables other researchers to methodically and systematically review your analysis.

The process of coding qualitative data varies widely depending on the objective of your research. But in general, it involves a process of reading through your data, applying codes to excerpts, conducting various rounds of coding, grouping codes according to themes, and then making interpretations that lead to your ultimate research findings. You may start with an initial round of coding to summarize or describe excerpts, and then do a second round of coding that adds your own interpretive lens.

There’s no right or wrong way to code a set of data, just some approaches that are more or less appropriate depending on your research objective. Below are various types of coding, which you can mix and match according to what works for you.

Deductive and inductive approaches to qualitative coding

Before coding in qualitative research, you should decide if you want to start off with a set of codes and stick with them (deductive coding), come up with the codes as you read what you see in your data (inductive coding), or take a combination approach.

Inductive coding

Ground up coding

Inductive coding is a ground-up approach where you derive your codes from the data. You don’t start with preconceived notions of what the codes should be, but allow the narrative or theory to emerge from the raw data itself. This is great for exploratory research or times when you want to come up with a new theories, ideas or concepts.

Deductive Coding

Top down coding

Deductive coding is a top down approach where you start by developing a codebook with your initial set of codes. This set could be based on your research questions or an existing research framework or theory. You then read through the data and assign excerpts to codes. At the end of your analysis, your codes should still closely resemble the codebook that you started off with. This is good when you have a pre-determined structure for how you need your final findings to be. For example, program evaluation studies may utilize a deductive coding approach.

See how to create a qualitative codebook.

Combining inductive and deductive approaches

In practice, research studies often combine both deductive and inductive approaches to coding. For example, you could deductively start with a set of codes, but then inductively come up with new codes and iterate on the codes as you sift through your data.

Read more about inductive and deductive coding.

How to do coding:

1. Do your first round pass at coding qualitative data

2. Organize your qualitative codes into categories and subcodes

3. Do further rounds of qualitative coding

4. Turn codes and categories into your final narrative

1. Do your first round pass at coding qualitative data

Your first round pass of coding qualitative data involves reading the data and assigning codes to various excerpts. This step is fast and loose. Don’t worry so much about creating the perfect codes since you’ll be iterating and evolving the codes as you go onto the second pass at coding, and beyond.

So how do you determine what to name the codes and what parts of the data to code? Here are some examples of types of coding methods that are commonly used in the first round pass.

Examples of coding:

In Vivo Coding

Using the participant’s own words

With In Vivo coding, you code an excerpt based on a participant’s own words, and not your own interpretation as a researcher. You’re trying to utilize the participant’s own spoken language and stay as close to their intent and meaning as possible. In Vivo coding is often used as a first step to summarize passages into single words or phrases extracted from the interview itself. It is a common form of interview coding.

See how to do in vivo coding and an in vivo coding qualitative data example.

Process Coding

Capturing an action

With Process coding, you use codes to communicate an action in the qualitative data. Codes will typically be gerunds that end with “ing”.

See how to do process coding.

Open Coding

An initial round of loose and tentative coding

With Open coding, you break down the qualitative data into discrete excerpts. The codes represent a label, description, definition, or category name. The codes produced in a round of open coding are meant to be loose and tentative and subject to evolve and change as you code in further rounds.

See how to do open, axial and selective coding.

Descriptive Coding

With Descriptive coding, you summarize the content of the text into a description. The code name should be a word or a noun that encapsulates the contents of the qualitative data.

See how to do descriptive coding.

Structural Coding

With structural coding, you categorize sections of your text according to a specific structure with the intent to continue analyzing within these structures. It’s a way to break your qualitative data into smaller increments. For example if you’re analyzing a semi-structured interview, you may have a question-based code that classifies all the answers to that question.

See how to do structural coding.

Values Coding

With Values coding, you code excerpts that pertain to the participant’s values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Simultaneous Coding

Simultaneous coding is a method of qualitative coding where a single excerpt of qualitative data is coded with multiple codes.

See how to do simultaneous coding

2. Organize your codes into categories and subcodes

After your first round pass at coding qualitative data, you can begin to group your codes into categories. These categories can be organized in a variety of ways. Within each category, you can group together codes that are similar to each other, or pertain to the same topics or general concept. Iterate on these categories and move the codes around until you find a structure that makes sense for your analysis.

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See the step by step process of qualitative coding

3. Do further rounds of coding qualitative data

Next, do further rounds of coding qualitative data to re-examine the codes and categories you’ve created so far. In this phase, you may re-name, re-code, merge codes, and re-categorize the work you’ve done so far. While the first round pass at coding data was fast and loose, these rounds of coding are about reanalyzing, finding patterns, and getting closer to developing theories and concepts.

In general, you should be reducing the number of codes from your initial round of coding, and actively reflecting on how to best categorize the codes you have.

Here are some methods of coding qualitative data that are commonly used in second-round coding and beyond. Read about various types of coding.

Thematic Analysis Coding

Find recurring patterns and themes

Thematic analysis coding is utilized when you’re looking for themes or patterns across your qualitative data set. If you find a pattern within different parts of your qualitative data or see that certain excerpts point to the same underlying idea or meaning, code those excerpts with a unifying code.

See how to do thematic analysis.

Pattern Coding

With Pattern coding, you group similarly coded excerpts under one overarching code to describe a pattern.

Read more about pattern coding

Focused coding / selective coding

With Focused coding, you create a finalized set of codes and categories from your first coding pass (often from “open coding”). You then re-code the qualitative data according to this final code list with the intent to not deviate from it. In comparison to an initial “open coding” pass which allows for emergent and changing codes, focused coding is a method where you don’t intend to change the code list any further.

Axial coding

With axial coding, you relate codes or categories to one another. You’re looking for relationships and links between what you found in earlier rounds of coding.

See how to do open, axial, and selective coding.

Theoretical coding

With theoretical coding, you conceptualize a hypothesis of a theoretical framework through sorting and organizing codes. You structure the codes and categories that emerged from qualitative data into a theory.

Elaborative coding

With elaborative coding, you apply a theory from a previous research study and observe whether or not your current codes and categories relate. You can think about it as elaborating on pre-existing theories.

Longitudinal coding

With longitudinal coding, you organize your existing codes and categories in a way that enables you to compare them over time.

Content analysis coding

With content analysis, you examine and understand the content of textual data. There are two types of methodological approaches to content analysis: quantitative content analysis and qualitative content analysis. 

See how to do qualitative content analysis.

4. Turn codes and categories into your final narrative

After these rounds of coding qualitative data, and doing various types of coding, you take those codes and categories and use them to construct your final narrative. Depending on the purpose of your research, the final outcome of your research can take many forms: a theory, a set of findings, or a narrative. In this phase you combine the creativity of structuring a narrative with the analytical nature of connecting your narrative to your codes and theories grounded in qualitative data.

Start writing out your theory, findings, and narrative, and reference the codes and categories that were used to inform them. Now, structure these into your final research deliverable.