Kanygin G.V., Koretskaya V.S. Analytical coding. Peterburgskaya sociologiya segodnya [Petersburg sociology today], 2018, Issue 10, pp. 99-121

Abstract

The article discusses coding techniques of the qualitative data analysis programs, widely applied in sociological analysis of natural language evidences, provided by informants. We argue that the shortcoming of the traditional techniques is the instrumental weakness of the coding tool and propose a novel method of analytical coding, which overcomes this limitation. Our technique makes the relationships, widely used in contemporary programming (modularity, visualization, compilation, etc.), available for sociologists during conceptualization of informant's materials. We apply proposed methods to a sample of textual evidence, and demonstrate their operations. In particular, we hope to establish their usefulness in (1) elaborating and integrating natural language notations, (2) compiling coding results into semantic networks, and (3) visualizing the entire process.