Developing your initial coding
Consider🤔 Critical Considerations
At the end of the Start Coding section we covered two key ways in which to develop your coding:
- Creating a code hierarchy, so have broader ‘parent’ codes containing more specific ‘child’ codes.
- Uncoding sections that you had previously coded, whether to undo mistakes or as part of the process of refining what text is coded at each code.
As you continue coding you may start to consider whether more substantial changes are needed.
Firstly, don’t panic - this is a perfectly normal aspect of the coding process. It is rare to end coding with all the codes exactly the same as they were after only coding a couple of transcripts. Instead, codes may be renamed, merged together, recoded to new codes, and so on.
Secondly, whilst it may not be initially obvious, NVivo does provide tools to help manage developing your coding. As examples, we will cover:
- Using ‘organisation codes’ as an additional layer of reflexive coding.
- Creating a ‘code matrix query’ to view text coded to both thematic and organisation codes.
- Linking memos to codes and using memo ‘see also links’ as means of jotting down reflections as you code.
- Auto-coding memos to find all relevant sections from your memos.
- Organising codes with ‘static sets’ to aid in recoding.