I am no ethnographer, but would argue that neither solution makes the most of our data model.
1 . Beware false hierarchies. Discrimination is definitely not a child of homosexuality. Hierarchies are meant in a proper ontological sense: cat is a child of mammal, and France is a child of Europe.
2. Double codes are bad practice. homosexuality:discrimination destroys the information that two separate experiences are mentioned in the same post. In SSNA, you are supposed to enter two separate codes, homosexuality and discrimination. The connection between the two is meant to be emergent: if (and only if) many posts mention both experiences, the semantic graph will show a strong connection. Formally, connections between experiences or concepts are represented by edges, not collapsed into nodes.
The advantage of coding thus is large. Somewhere else in the conversation you could have discrimination associated to something else, say age. The ego network of discrimination will then show you the various aspects of discrimination in the corpus. With double coding, you have to fall back on human memory to rebuild it. “Wait, did I not see discrimination elsewhere?” With large corpora and several people coding, this problem becomes more severe. SSNA’s main advantage is scalability, so it is essential to code for that. Your codes are no longer a memory aid for you, but a memory aid for the collective effort of several researchers plus a computer system.
@amelia, what’s your take here?