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## Getting Started with Coding: Why We Code Qualitative Data
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Many qualitative researchers spend much of their analytic effort on coding data, i.e. assigning labels to excerpts in the data. That is also what we will focus on today. But before doing so, it is still worthwhile to focus on _why_ we code in the first place.
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Coding is a form of abstraction: we make sense of large (sometimes overwhelming) amounts of qualitative data -- somtimes referred to as "unstructured data" and generate some structure by coding it. This abstraction is not cost free: by *forcing* codes onto your data, you may lose some nuance and specificity. Some qualitative traditions will therefore encourage you to only start coding once you are deeply familiar with your data. Most traditions encourage an ongoing back-and-forth between data and codes to make sure data and codes match.
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Coding is a form of abstraction: we make sense of large (sometimes overwhelming) amounts of qualitative data -- sometimes referred to as "unstructured data" and generate some structure by coding it. This abstraction is not cost free: by *forcing* codes onto your data, you may lose some nuance and specificity. Some qualitative traditions will therefore encourage you to only start coding once you are deeply familiar with your data. Most traditions encourage an ongoing back-and-forth between data and codes to make sure data and codes match.
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Moreover, the role of codes varies strongly between qualitative research traditions. In some traditions, codes are principally a background tool, used to _organize_ materials for later writing. That is the case, for example, for most ethnographic writing, as well as for many historically oriented approaches such as comparative historical analysis (as used in sociology and political science) or process tracing (as used in political science and administrative sciences). You will rarely find a mention of codes, coding schemas, or a codebook in published work using these methods, and not all of its practitioners may apply codes to data at all.
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