Survey Qualitative Coding
Open-ended responses can be qualitatively coded to produce measurable data that reflects relationships and trends among those responses.
Coding
There are fundamentally two approaches to coding:
Deductive coding, where the codebook is written before coding
Inductive/open coding, where the codebook is created and modified during coding
In practice, a mix of the two is most common. The latter becomes more difficult with larger coding teams.
Qualitative data analysis (QDA) software (e.g. NVivo, ATLAS.ti, Dedoose, MAXQDA, QDAMiner, Quickos) helps with the coding process.
Codebook Writing
Codebooks can be flat or hierarchical.
- Flat coding looks like "1", "2", and so on.
- Hierarchical coding looks like "1", "1A", "1B", "2", "2A", "2B", and so on.
- Issue with deeply hierarchical coding is inconsistency among coders' work.
Codes are almost never exclusive. Qualitative coding is inherently about measuring relationships and trends, so every meaningful data point is connected in multiple ways. If a response is only notable in one dimension, it likely isn't meaningful.