Organising, anonymising, coding, thematically analysing and summarising interview transcripts, open-ended survey responses, field notes and other texts.
Put transcribed recordings, interview notes or open-ended survey responses into a consistent text format.
Back up the original texts before formal analysis.
Remove or replace names, affiliations, addresses, contact details and other sensitive information.
Privacy protection is crucial in qualitative research.
Create initial codes from the research questions, then refine code definitions after trial coding.
Don't make the coding scheme too detailed at the start; allow it to evolve.
Code interview passages and record typical quotes and relationships between themes.
When several people code, discuss agreement between coders.
Combine coding results, word frequencies, co-occurrence and representative quotes into the findings.
Word frequencies only support interpretation; they cannot replace qualitative judgement.
