Reference no: EM133088050

Coding for Qualitative Research

Requirements: This week's exercise requires access to the NVivo software, which is the primary software used at Federation University to carry out qualitative research. If for some reason this is not available, you can either use alternative software (for example, there is a free download of a trial version of the Quirkos software here or you can do the coding by hand using the comment functionality in Word and Acrobat to mark up the provided text files.

Aim:

This week's exercise is designed to introduce you to the process of coding which underpins the analysis of qualitative data. While you won't actually be carrying this coding process out as part of assessment tasks in this course (as we are only writing a research proposal and so will not reach the stage of having actual data which needs to be analysed), having a familiarity with the basics of this style of analysis will still be useful if you are designing a qualitative research project.

Part A:

We will be using the NVivo software so start by watching the first three video tutorials available at this link

• What Nvivo does
• Importing Data
• Coding (this on the next page - follow the "Next tutorial: Getting Started - Organize" link at the bottom of the page)
Note, these videos are based on the Mac version of NVivo, but the Windows version provides the same functionality.

Part B:

On Moodle, there is a zip file containing some sample qualitative data relating to interviews with people about their breakfast habits

Download this zip file and extract the files contained in it to your own directory. There are five example source files in a mixture of Word and pdf format. There is also a sample report - don't look at that yet!

Launch the NVivo software, and follow the steps from the video to import the five source files.

Read through the files and use NVivo to highlight key sections of the text and assign them to codes which you think capture the main themes across the five documents.

Once you have completed this, or in the later stages of the class if you run out of time to code all five documents, you can compare the codes and text selections which you made against the sample coding report provided by Quirkos. Note the layout of this report is very different from yours as it was done in a different tool, but focus on the codes which were identified and the sections of text assigned to each code, and compare this against your own decisions.

Attachment:- Coding for Qualitative Research.rar