Blog Posts

There is no answer to this perennial question – not even any guidelines. You need as many codes as you need – in other words, however many are needed to capture what’s going on in the data in relation to your analytic focus and research objectives. How many depends on what you’re using the codes to represent, how you derive them, and how you intend to use them in the analysis. I’ve done substantial projects with as few as 22 codes, and others that required several hundred. Co

What lies behind the red flag question: “I’ve done all my coding – now what?” In my last blogpost I considered the first likely culprit: starting to code before thinking through its purpose. But thinking about the purpose isn’t enough. A second issue is the need to think about coding as an on-going process – not as a single event that gets “done” before moving on to the next event. Coding is the opportunity to repeatedly connect with our data. Moments of contact There are

Yet again this week I was asked the red flag question in a CAQDAS workshop: “Coding’s done. Now what?” This flags the inappropriate use of CAQDAS: no analytic planning done before plunging into helter-skelter coding. In this post and the next I’ll deal with the two underlying problems: starting to code without thinking about its purpose, and thinking of coding as an event rather than a process. Taken together these can result in a mass of codes that don’t lead to a thoughtful

“Translation” is the key concept in our Five-Level QDA method, so it’s important to know what it means. The word just showed up in the title of Susanne Friese’s blog post on the ATLAS.ti website – “Translating the process of open/initial coding in Grounded Theory” – and Susanne ended by inviting readers “to read more about this process of translation” in our textbooks on the Five-Level QDA method coming from Routledge in September. But as Susanne uses the word “translation” i

Writing spaces are one of the most valuable features of dedicated CAQDAS packages. But I often see projects that make little use of them. Here’s why they are so potentially powerful. Access to analytic insights I've previously written about how using CAQDAS packages is all about access. As soon as you start using a dedicated CAQDAS package the increased access to your materials is obvious - all project materials are right there to view and work with as soon as you open the C