Discussions in debriefing meetings also help identify recurring or key issues and can inform what codes are necessary. To develop a preliminary coding scheme, researchers consider what questions they are trying to answer and the related topics to those questions. A coding scheme is a set of codes, defined by the words and phrases that researchers assign to categorize a segment of the data by topic. There are several steps to coding, which is often an iterative process.ġ. It is a process of assigning codes, words, or phrases that identify to which topics or issues portions of the data refer, and organizing the data in a way that is useful for further analysis (Bailey 2007). CodingĬoding is one method for creating analytic files and documenting and validating data across all members of the research team. Researchers also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of evidence and possible alternative explanations (Martinson and O’Brien 2010). The meetings allow researchers to identify issues that are recurring across different sites or aspects of a site that are unique. During these meetings, researchers report their preliminary impressions from data collection to date. When multiple researchers are conducting this work, they meet periodically throughout the data collection period to have team debriefing meetings. For projects of this nature, it is usually not feasible for just one researcher or pair of researchers to conduct all of the qualitative data collection. Often, research projects require site visits to multiple locations or programs to conduct interviews, focus groups, and/or observations. If multiple researchers conducted the data collection activity together, each researcher’s notes are reviewed by the other researcher(s), so that the other researcher(s) can add any additional information to ensure the comprehensiveness of the data. Researchers also organize their notes so that other researchers can easily identify where topics were discussed or observed.

Researchers review the collected data to ensure that the notes and descriptions are written clearly such that someone who did not participate in the data collection can easily understand what happened or what was said.

Qualitative data analysis methods