Research Tips
Coding Qualitative Data
Qualitative data collection procedures, including interviews, focus groups, and open-ended survey questions, can yield an abundance of rich information. Reading through individual qualitative responses can lead to important insights; however, people sometimes struggle to find ways to summarize qualitative data.
One way to summarize qualitative data is to assign codes to the responses, so that similar responses can be grouped together, counted, etc. The coding system can be predetermined or derived based on the responses received, and can be hierarchical to allow for different levels of content analysis.
The two main benefits of coding qualitative data are:
- It makes it easier to understand and describe how widely held a particular view is. This reduces the chances of putting too much emphasis on an articulately expressed yet not widely shared opinion, which is a common mistake in qualitative research.
- It makes it possible to jointly analyze qualitative and quantitative data; for example, investigating whether a particular type of comment was most often made by people in a particular age or income bracket.