Archaeologies of coding qualitative data

In the last blog post I referenced a workshop session at the International Conference of Qualitative Inquiry entitled the ‘Archaeology of Coding’. Personally I interpreted archaeology of qualitative analysis as being a process of revisiting and examining an older project. Much of the interpretation in the conference panel was around revisiting and iterating coding within a single analytical attempt, and this is very important.

In qualitative analysis it is rarely sufficient to only read through and code your data once. An iterative and cyclical process is preferable, often building on and reconsidering previous rounds of coding to get to higher levels of interpretation. This is one of the ways to interpret an ‘archaeology’ of coding – like Jerusalem, the foundations of each successive city is built on the groundwork of the old. And it does not necessarily involve demolishing the old coding cycle to create a new one – some codes and themes (just like significant buildings in a restructured city) may survive into the new interpretation.

But perhaps there is also a way in which coding archaeology can be more like a dig site: going back down through older layers to uncover something revealing. I allude to this more in the blog post on ‘Top down or bottom up’ coding approaches, because of course you can start your qualitative analysis by identifying large common themes, and then breaking these up into more specific and nuanced insight into the data.

But both these iterative techniques are envisaged as part of a single (if long) process of coding. But what about revisiting older research projects? If you get the opportunity to go back and re-examine old qualitative data and analysis?

Secondary data analysis can be very useful, especially when you have additional questions to ask of the data, such as in this example by Notz (2005). But it can also be useful to revisit the same data, question or topic when the context around them changes, for example due to a major event or change in policy.

A good example is our teaching dataset conducted after the referendum for Scottish Independence a few years ago. This looked to see how the debate had influenced voters interpretations of the different political parties and how they would vote in the general election that year. Since then, there has been a referendum on the UK leaving the EU, and another general election. Revisiting this data would be very interesting in retrospect of these events. It is easy to see from the qualitative interviews that voters in Scotland would overwhelmingly vote to stay in the EU. However, it would not be up-to-date enough to show the ‘referendum fatigue’ that was interpreted as a major factor reducing support for the Scottish National Party in the most recent election. Yet examining the historical data in this context can be revealing, and perhaps explain variance in voting patterns in the changing winds of politics and policy in Scotland.

While the research questions and analysis framework devised for the original research project would not answer the new questions we have of the data, creating new or appended analytical categories would be insightful. For example, many of the original codes (or Quirks) identifying political parties people were talking about will still be useful, but how they map to policies might be reinterpreted, or higher level themes such as the extent that people perceive a necessity for referendum, or value of remaining part of the EU (which was a big question if Scotland became independent). Actually, if this sounds interesting to you, feel free to re-examine the data – it is freely available in raw and coded formats.

Of course, it would be even more valuable to complement the existing qualitative data with new interviews, perhaps even from the same participants to see how their opinions and voting intentions have changed. Longitudinal case studies like this can be very insightful and while difficult to design specifically for this purpose (Calman, Brunton, Molassiotis 2013), can be retroactively extended in some situations.

And of course, this is the real power of archaeology: when it connects patterns and behaviours of the old with the new. This is true whether we are talking about the use of historical buildings, or interpretations of qualitative data. So there can be great, and often unexpected value in revisiting some of your old data. For many people it’s something that the pressures of marking, research grants and the like push to the back burner. But if you get a chance this summer, why not download some quick to learn qualitative analysis software like Quirkos and do a bit of data archaeology of your own?