How to code a document and create themes

greetings friends in this short little video I want to talk about the specifics of how to complete this assignment which is coding a document and then also creating themes and how that all ends up in the writing up of a particular theme as we've mentioned before this is an iterative process which means you you start at one place which is the collection of data an interview or observations or any number of different tangible expressions of human behavior and then you in this case we make a transcript out of an interview we will read through that

interview and time and time again in stuck at the beginning of the coding process and as you will see in a few minutes this is a process the next step is in the process to code that material and then also begin to start thinking about making themes for out of those codes so I think the best way to do that is to go ahead and actually demonstrate that for you so you can see how that that that actually can work so what I have here is I have another interview one that we're not using here

I've begun the coding process and number different ways you can go about this what idea was I just highlighted a section and up here at the top is a little command that can give it a give that section of color and I began to start coding this document you chunk it you take a little section and you read it and highlight it if it expresses some idea or thoughts or a concept and then you give that a name that will indicate to you what that that particular section is all about now we said there's number

of different ways that you can do this you can this number of ways you can choose the name for that section you you can take the you know the image of that section folks you know to talk about maybe fear or anxiety or hope for the future or something like that that's that particular section you know VOC some kind of idea and your imagination you actually can take a word out of that section that's called in vivo coding or there might be something in the literature that you have read before a particular technical way of

expressing something so what you'll do is you'll go through the section with the document section by section and I've stopped right here because I want to draw attention to this particular paragraph and talk about how you might code this section in this section a person talks about the philosophy of education that they have my floss of education that every child should and will be able to learn and apply every lesson taught to the best of his or her ability it will accomplish this by always expecting and encourage you the best my students and it goes

on and on about imagining imagining what this person might be like well this doesn't look exactly like a reason become a teacher but actually when you think about it it's it does because what this person is doing is imagining a future self so I would go ahead and and highlight that and calling this just that and that certainly is something that can motivate anybody to do anything is you know what what I will be like in the future again down here same thing do my best I will so match all of this is is imagining

what this person will be like which can be a powerful a powerful tool that they that they can choose so those doctor is doctor I know my students should be bright to the opportunities hopefully that'll be the case and look at right here leading by example I want to be a role model leading by example as maintain professionalism you know that's that that certainly is a theme that we could are a code that we could use by the way when you're using word to to put a code in this column to the left you have

to go unfortunately it's not all that user-friendly but you have to go all the way back to the last time you entered something and hit the return key a number of times until you get down to the play we're the new code is going to go so right here and I'm going to call this desire or significance technique fingers aren't working all that well right now so when you go through all the documents and then you create these codes the next thing you'll want to do is to start bringing these codes together and beginning the

process of forming themes now previous video we talked about how this actually looks so you would start with your initial read and dividing it coding it dividing a segments encoding it then we're going to start collapsing these things into themes and so we started with many pages of texts and next thing we know we're down to segments that we've identified and 30 to 40 codes reduced to 20,000 three to five themes that's the next process that we're going to go through so we've come here and what I'm going to do is just in the interest

of time I'm not going to go through an extensive process but I want to show you how how this can be done so there's this one one group that already has begun this process and I just want to take some of their examples and this is the one that I did for for you all then here's the next one in the sequence and so here's here's some some codes that they've suggested it's one way to do this is just to go ahead and copy those codes and go over into a Word document and you can

just create a little table like this and use this as your working area underneath it's a little clunky but I think you'll get the idea here I copied and pasted what that group said and then I began to start moving those into the table above and as I move them I began to start thinking about how we might group so I put the positive influence here inspired by mother up there I took these from the the document that I coded and so I think I'll kind of give this the theme of personal significance childhood fascination

um I'm not sure what to call that just um kind of no imagination for now and then go back to the to the documents and just continue to take the codes and bring them on over into that document in a lot of different ways to do this this is just one of them so you would continue this process qualities to strive for hmm looks like that could go under this section here so you get the idea understand a hard times probably need to go back to the document and find out exactly what so so it

looks like the reason I believe teaching six busy so this is you know an idea of you know being personally qualified because they understand hard times and that certainly can be a motivation to become a teacher you want to do something that used to be good at and you think you're going to be good at something because you've had experiences in that area that certainly would qualify so you would keep doing this and develop themes now this is one way of doing this there's a lot of different ways another way would be just to do

the same thing except with sticky notes I did this here but you could just go ahead and put all of these on sticky notes and this is the most common probably still is the most common way that people do this kind of work is because it does allow you to chanting it's very easy and quickly move things around and there's our you know our theme of you know personal significance we're just moving all these around here doing something important that go over here so you get the idea of how this works you keep going through

this process chunking coding and so on and at the very end yeah in this class we're doing this as a group project but you could obviously do this by yourself and when you are going to do your own project you would do this part yourself as well then at the very end what you do is bring it all together into one document and this is one I think an outstanding example it's it's it's a part of the resources now for 3.3 but this is a very good a good example of how to actually write this

up and what draw attention to to a couple of features so that first as you notice it's not just a collection of quotes sewn together with and Cheryl said and Donna said and Philip said no you can see the the artistry of the writer right from the beginning which qualitative research allows you to do notice the section starts with a fire can't happen without an initial spark inspiration of some sort was a common theme that caused a spark that lit the fire for interviewees to become teachers so this is a great hook for this section

again it's not just the dry reporting of the data it begins to engage the reader at a more than to cognitive level at an emotional level which is perfectly appropriate for qualitative research and then here referencing them referencing them sure here is a quantitative state event made qualitatively rather than chart the author writes more than half of the interviewees they reference to a role model or historico figure parents or someone else so getting great opening paragraph it's not just a resuscitation of facts but actually you know begins to merge the researcher and the artist at

the same time and then begins to start referencing and here's the data this is just like it's just like a chart in quantitative research it's a chart that instead of a table it's a series of references to the data that was used to support this particular assertion sirs and again it's just a very short quote by an it could be longer barbary same thing just reflected on on the question and again nope no quote here so you don't have to just always quote quote quote quote quote you can summarize in fact sometimes analyst series of

quotes are rather fatiguing to read so here's a contrary statement what Emma said no later and rather earlier in life later in life other than later life earlier in life you want to be a career teacher so again you can you just go through a document like this and gives you an excellence in the works we're starting from this r''l read-through dividing into segments coding kind of looking for Duensing bringing them together and collapsing them into three to five themes for this particular assignments you're going to just go ahead and write on one of those

themes rich with a rich thick description as we saw in our example okay now one final thing at the end of it all you won't be doing that this in this chapter but you will want to go back and reference the literature that you found on the topic and here's a couple examples of what that might look like this is most of the time you would write in chapter 4 but just give you a heads up that you do circle back and either confirm or challenge the findings that were in the literature so that's about

it for the assignments the best best of luck to you as you as you work on this and don't be afraid to shoot me an email if you have any questions