Organising codes

Connections between codes

After a few rounds of open coding, and some reflection as you along, some hierarchical structures might emerge.

Consider🤔 Critical Considerations

Look at your open codes and ask yourself:

• Are there any common themes that might make a good ‘parent code’?
• Do any codes refer to a theme or idea that may be experienced in a number of different ways (different sources, targets, circumstances, etc.)?
• Are there any common categories that would be useful to think with across many codes and examples?
• Do some of your codes exist within a common theme that could become a parent code?
• Does it make sense to nest down, or create a new top code?

NVivo jargon: top level codes are called ‘parent codes’; sub-codes are called ‘child codes’.

Hierachical tree coding

• As we’ve already shown you, you can create a new parent code and drag in existing codes as sub-codes
• You can also create new ‘child nodes’ i.e. subcodes of existing codes.
• You can collapse codes by right clicking->copy- Merge into selected code

Recommendations

• For beginners, and at the very start of coding, 2 levels are probably enough
• More than 3-4 levels becomes unwieldy