Friday, 24 April 2015

The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, 2^nd Edition,
Johnny Saldana, Sage, 2013, page 76

While working to code my initial interviews, I have been struck by the intensity of some of the feelings and emotions being described. How is this level of feelng to be coded? Saldana proposes Magnitude Coding.

Grounded theory coding methods recommend the search for a property's or category's dimensions such as intensity and frequency. Magnitude Coding can be used ued as subcodes during First Cycle stages to tentatively plot the ranges observed in the data for these dimensions.

Adding a numerical suffix to a code - perhaps on an arbitrary 1-10 scale - provides one possible way of attaching a scale of intensity to an observed phenomenon.

Numbers and words, or quantities and qualities, can sometimes work in conjunction rather than opposition.

Let's give it a try and see what happens!