

I find that most of us are not very articulate about what we mean by each of the codes we are using to investigate the data. It just seems too hard doesn’t it?īelieve me, the tedious work is well worth it! But often we don’t document these in detail. We often feel we have clear conceptualizations of what we mean by different codes related to our data. thematic analysis) we believe we need to do an adequate, and hopefully even good analysis of the data we often struggled many months or years to collect. We all approach our data with the best of intentions, equipping ourselves with the tools (e.g. I have seen how it helps to fix some of the challenges that researches face when coding qualitative data. This article has become my research bible.
CODEBOOK FOR QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROFESSIONAL
The topic of a codebook came to my immediate attention when I read the article “ Developing and Using a Codebook for the Analysis of Interview Data: An Example from a Professional Development Research Project” by DeCuir-Gunby, Marshall and McCulloch, which was published in the Field Methods journal in 2010. (Thanks QSR for inviting me to write this post!) Every single researcher I have discussed this with (and they are now in the hundreds) has found some benefit in this, so I had to share it with you. I originally began writing this blog post about teamwork and my recent experiences in seeing how important it is to clarify the definitions of codes when working in teams.īut I now realize that such advice applies to all researchers, in all disciplines, studying all manner of topics. In this post, Dr Jenine Beekhuyzen explains the importance of a codebook when working in a research team.
