POPREBEL Coding Thread (LEGACY)

[amelia]

@Jan

The most urgent issue: is it possible to duplicate a threat of a conversation, so we could code it on the platform separately (also inter-coder reliability) and only then to compare our codes and reconcile them? It is - we believe - a very useful exercise, at least the beginning, to compare and try to synchronize our coding “habits.”

If this is just an exercise, you can copy/paste the content and create a new thread of your own as a “test”. I’d recommend @Jan being the test subject, since he assigns less codes, so it’ll be easier to transpose them onto the original thread if you want to merge them. Does this work for you?

@Jan

The mother-child code relationship. Say, we code “homosexuality” and it intersects in the coded fragment with the issue of “various approaches”. Wojtek codes separately assuming that if we want to get the intersection the software will catch it and display. I code: mother: “homosexuality” and child: “homosexuality: various approaches.” What is your advice?

Does @Wojt create a hierarchy in the backend, or just co-code? If the latter, that’s a good approach that would ideally be combined with yours as well. Yours works, but only if you assign parent-child codes that makes sense from an SSNA point of view. First, the top-level code will not auto-assign to the ones below it. @hugi and our team on a different project tried having this happen automatically, but it lead to a giant overproliferation of codes that rendered the SSNA meaningless. Second, “various approaches” is too vague on its own (to be honest, I don’t think the code “homosexuality:various approaches” is very descriptive either, so ideally the “lower level” code would be a more specific thing (e.g. “lesbian relationships”).

The plan (as articulated in this post, which you should both read carefully) with hierarchies is as follows:

@amelia

Wait to assign hierarchies / parent-child relations in the backend until we do this together as a batch after the SSNA visualisation, since our hierarchical relationships now affect each other. Do this as much as you want in your own codebook— this is encouraged (see point 2)

So, in short – apply both top-level code and lower-level code if it applies, but be discerning. Use hierarchies in your own codebook, and we will then apply them together in the backend and use them to refine codes and apply top-level codes more widely if we need to – it’s very easy using the “copy” function in the backend to apply a top-level code to all instances of a lower-level code, but doing so automatically leads to too much vagueness/heavy co-occurrences on too high-level codes. If we do so more deliberately, in tandem with the SSNA creation, we get a more refined and accurate picture of the data. (as I describe this, @alberto, this might be a methodological point for us to note).

@Jan

Wojtek observed that if, say, he codes the whole entry with CODE1 and then codes a part of it with CODE2 and then wants to adde CODE3, say, to a word, he cannot do this. The system allows only two codes “on one bit of text”, it seems.

Just right click outside of the selection and you’ll be able to add more codes than 2 (we’ve discussed this on multiple occasions in the POPREBEL team and I go over it in training, but perhaps we need a more centralised documentation to refresh memories as it’s a lot of information to keep track of).

@matthias, feel free to check me on these answers