Decoding through Data Coding

For me, the coding process was initially difficult because I was extremely hesitant to assign codes to segments of texts for fear of inaccurately grouping the data. There’s a power to dissecting other’s words and mining them for useful information. Especially as I started to code along with the rest of my group, I was worried that the codes that I was creating wouldn’t fit the data right, and I wasn’t sure how specific or general the initial round of coding was supposed to be in practice. At first the requirement of creating 30-40 codes seemed like more than enough, but once I really conceptualized the amount of data that those 30-40 codes needed to cover, my opinion definitely changed.

When I started to think of coding data as a type of close reading (a process that I am more familiar with and sometimes even enjoy) instead of a new and complex system of qualitative analysis (which it also is, of course), I was able to get a better sense of what I was doing and then actually code the data I needed to code.

And as I have coded more and more, I have found that coding really helps to visualize the interconnectedness of the data from different students, teachers, and alumni. Through a unified color coding system, trends jump off the page without one needing to draw the connection based only on what they remember having read before.

Coding also can reveal the underlying meaning of the data. For example, my research group is focusing on students’ imagined futures and post-graduation outcomes within the Westernized school model of Olive Grove Academy. So by coding teachers’ perception of student futures and students’/alumni’s perception of their own futures, the contrasts between the three viewpoints and the motivations behind them come to light. I can look at what a teacher’s goals were for shaping global citizens or community engagement and then look at how those goals translate into the life paths students want to take or are taking after graduating from the school.

Over the time I’ve been coding, our class has started to read Pierre Bourdieu’s State Nobility. As a result, I’ve found that the insights I’m able to take away from the data have deepened—or at least become heavily influenced by this influx of theory. When the term “esprit de corps” came up in one of the interviews I was reading, I coincidentally recalled reading that same phrase not even a hour earlier in State Nobility in a section about preparatory schools’ cultivation of an exclusive common culture that serves to shape and maintain elite culture. This very happenstance connection helped me to think deeply about the meaning of the data, and it  also helped me to  understand Bourdieu’s theories better because I could apply them to a context with which I am more familiar than the French system on which Bourdieu grounds his theories.