codifying qualitative data
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When researchers talk about “coding” data, they might be doing something like taking a bunch of varied qualitative responses to questions and putting them in categories to make them better able to be analyzed statistically.
For example if I ask people in interviews, “tell us what you think about reddit”, and then I want to use their responses to perform analyses to answer “percent of people who view reddit favorably” I’d need to go through and “code” each verbal response as “favorable” or “unfavorable”. “Coding” the data is what allows what are in fact a series of unique verbal responses to be analyzed categorically. It is useful on data sets where the collection of information has already been done and a specific question can’t be asked, or when the specific question itself – upon asking – is too loaded. (e.g. you can’t ask people “are you racist (yes/no)” to learn if people tend to have racist thoughts because the idea of being racist is so loaded).
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