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Chapter 9 |
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Objective:
Directions:
The Resources module contains ten narrative letters written to friends that describe what the writers feel would be the ultimate vacation. There is a file for each of the ten participants. You can download and print each file to code it. As you code, use the following purpose statement and research questions to guide your thinking:
Purpose statement: The purpose of this qualitative research study is to explore how graduate students describe the ultimate vacation.
Research questions:
1. What are the reasons for taking a vacation?
2. What do graduate students do on a vacation?
3. Where do graduate students go on a vacation?
To help you begin, a paragraph from the first narrative is included as an example of how to code data. When you code, you are asking yourself one simple question, "What does the text say?" Or, "What is the passage about?" While you may start coding by looking at entire paragraphs, you may need to narrow your focus to specific sentences, because many times speakers or writers change subjects within paragraphs.
Take a look at the paragraph below.
Dear Cathey,I am so excited to tell you about a dream vacation that we can go on next summer. Don't worry about the money because it is very affordable and it will be well worth our time, and since we will be on sunny beaches wearing swimming suits (definitely NOT bikinis) maybe we will get re-motivated to start exercising in the mornings again.
Highlight the first sentence. Then, ask yourself what word, or up to three words, captures what the author is talking about.
Dear Cathey,I am so excited to tell you about a dream vacation that we can go on next summer.
She is talking about how excited she is to go on vacation. If you were coding this sentence you would write the word, "excitement" in the margin—the code that describes what has been said.
Now, highlight the second sentence. This time, there are several ideas that come out.
Don't worry about the money because it is very affordable and it will be well worth our time, and since we will be on sunny beaches wearing swimming suits (definitely NOT bikinis) maybe we will get re-motivated to start exercising in the mornings again.
There are two ideas that the author is talking about here. First, she is talking about money and second, she is talking about going on vacation as a means to motivate her to exercise. This means that there are two codes, which are "money" and "motivation." If you were coding this sentence you would write "money" and "motivation" in the margin.
Follow this same procedure for all of the narratives until you have coded all of them. When possible, look for words that are in the text to use as codes. These are "in vivo" codes. In addition, try to keep the number of codes to a minimum. Look at the codes you have before deciding to include a new one. This will help you to focus better on the meaning and will minimize the possibility of getting lost in the number of codes. You will probably have only about 10 – 15 codes for this dataset because it is so short.
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