It's Called a 'Manual' for a Reason

OK, so Saldana has earned a permanent spot on my book shelves. It would take a lifetime (or at least the half a lifetime I have left) to experiment with all of the coding methods outlined in chapter 3. As a reduction of choices for my present research interests, I find that I am most attracted to the grammatical and elemental methods of coding. I’m sure this is due in part to the types of data that I have “stacked up waiting for my attention” and due in part also to the subjects of my research interest: namely, teaching and teacher education around the education of students with special learning needs.

I have decided, following the Atlas.ti training and the projects I am working with at present, to attempt to apply both elemental methods of descriptive and in vivo coding to the reflections of course participants in a study of the experience of participating in the seminar on existential phenomenological psychology last fall. This subset of the data is in the form of written reflections in which the students responded to phenomenologically structured questions on a worksheet. The opening prompt is, “Please list 2 or 3 things that stood out for you in class today,” followed by three numbered and lined spaces for the three things. Half way down the page is the second prompt, “Describe what you were aware of at one of these moments.”

Using Atlas.ti, I have completed a first cycle of descriptive and in vivo coding of the student reflections. I am struggling with the warning from Tesch (1990) as cited in Saldana, that I take care to code the “topic, not [an] abbreviation of the content” (Tesch as cited in Saldana, 2009, p. 70). This is a struggle for me in existential phenomenology where so often the topic is the content. Alas, I will continue to struggle and memo about this growing understanding.

I am also interested in exploring ways of using magnitude coding in a comparison of the student reflections to those of the instructor, Howard R. Pollio, following each of the classes. I interviewed Howard following each class meeting and asked him to answer the exact same questions as the students, “What are two or three things that stood out for you in class today.” The major difference with Howard’s interview is that we went into a description of each of the things that stood out for him instead of just one item like the student reflections. Several of the examples of magnitude coding (p. 58-61) gave me ideas of how I might include a comparison of the topics and magnitudes of Howard’s reflections with those of the students. This is of particular interest to me pedagogically.

Just for kicks, I went to the OCM website at Yale to check out what my ethnographic friends might be coding in their studies of culture. Wow! Who knew that there were nine different ways to code for “marriage” or eight codes under “drink and drugs?” Now, I see why so many anthropologists earned a reputation as hippies – go easy, it’s just a little ethno-humor. I also want to talk to the folks at Yale about why just seven codes exist for “education.” We’ll leave that for another day…

I get the feeling that Saldana’s pages will be turned many times in the next year of dissertation data coding, analysis and interpretation. I’m glad to be able to have this resource to re-examine data in ways that I would never have thought of on my own.