Step 3: Group Margin Notes

“Any researcher who wishes to become proficient at doing qualitative analysis must learn to code well and easily. The excellence of the research rests in large part on the excellence of the coding.”
— Anselm L. Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists, 1987, p. 27

In the simplest terms, codes are meaningful labels applied to blocks of text so that they can easily be retrieved at a later stage for further comparison and analysis.

Codes are given meaningful names that are relevant to the idea or topic under investigation. The process of coding (linking conceptually meaningful labels to text) involves close reading of the text. As new themes are identified from the data, new codes are created.

The list of codes will grow as new topics are identified. A running list of these codes is generally recorded in a code manual. As codes are meaningful ways of classifying the data, they can be developed in several ways including “a priori,” “in vivo,” or from your own invention.

A priori codes may be identified from a range of sources like previous research or theory. “In vivo” is Latin for “within the living” and refers to codes that are derived from participants’ terminology that captures meanings or experiences in their own terms.

Codes developed from your own invention are generally those codes that are grounded in the concepts that emerge from your transcript readings and are not drawn from pre-existing research.

Let’s take a look at the different types of codes you can generate.