Page 273 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes the usual way of building a coding frame is to take a subset of the data, and to generate the coding
frame from that.
An easy way to do this is to create a word processing file, and type in (or copy from another file)
about 100 verbatim comments from the content being analysed. If you leave a blank line above and
below each comment, and format the file in several columns, you can then print out the comments,
cut up the printout into lots of small pieces of paper, and rearrange the pieces on a table so that the
most similar ones are together. This sounds primitive, but it’s much faster than trying to do the
same thing using only a computer.
When similar codes are grouped together, they should be given a label. You can create either
conceptual labels (based a theory you are testing), or in vivo labels (based on vivid terms in
respondents’ own words).

Size
A coding frame for content analysis normally has between about 10 and 100 categories. With fewer
than 10 categories, you risk grouping dissimilar answers together, simply because the coding frame
doesn’t allow them to be separated. But with more than 100 categories, some will seem very similar,
and there’s a risk that two near-identical answers will be placed in different categories. If it’s important
to have a lot of categories, consider using hierarchical coding.

Hierarchical coding
This is also known as tree coding, with major groups (branches) and sub-groups (twigs). Each major
group is divided into a number of sub-groups, and each subgroup can then be divided further, if
necessary. This method can produce unlimited coding possibilities, but sometimes it is not possible
to create an unambiguous tree structure – for example, when the codes are very abstract.
As an example, a few years ago I worked on a study of news and current affairs items for a
broadcasting network. We created a list of 122 possible topics for news items, then divided these
topics into 12 main groups:
Crime and justice
Education
Environment
Finance
Government and politics
Health
International events and trends
Leisure activities and sport
Media and entertainment
Science and technology
Social issues
Work and industry
This coding frame was used for both a survey and a content analysis. We invited the survey
respondents to write in any categories that we’d forgotten to include, but our preliminary work in
setting up the structure had been thorough, and only a few minor changes were needed.
Because setting up a clear tree-like structure can take a long time, don’t use this method if you’re in
a hurry – a badly-formed tree causes problems when sub-groups are combined for the analysis.
(The Content Analysis section at the end of chapter 12 has practical details of tree coding.)

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