Collaborative Qualitative Analysis: An Analytical Workflow

By Kimberly Hirsh

In the last blog post, I described our technical workflow for collaborative coding in the EITM Lab. In this blog post, I will explain our analytical process. It works as follows:

1. For the first three transcripts, we undertook line-by-line coding, assigning a label to each line of code.
2. At the end of line-by-line coding, we had hundreds of individual codes, but many overlapped in meaning as each lab member created her own verbiage.
3. Laura and Kimberly then coded the codes, creating possible categories to use in the coding of future transcripts.
4. Dr. Melo reviewed the categories Laura and Kimberly had generated and built a codebook based on these categories and her own coding experience, providing definitions and examples for each code.
5. All three lab members then applied the categories Dr. Melo included in the codebook in later rounds of coding.
6. As we engaged in later rounds of coding, we continued to identify new codes and categories as we noticed them recurring in the data.

Do you have any questions about our data analysis process? Feel free to get in touch.