POPREBEL Ethnography Code Review Thread

Wellbeing in Europe POPREBEL Ethnography
1

Use this thread / topic for a running code review.

2

Hello all, here are my notes to codes that I am not sure we should merge, or that I do not understand the meaning, or I find unclear. I will tag you if you are the owner, or I think you could be competent to solve the problem.

  • language is child or registration which does not make much sense while it is much more general (@Richard)

  • probably for @amelia, I do not understand the codes: media good, media reference (used that the media refer about something/somebody)

  • @Jirka_Kocian you have support groups as a child of mental health, however, there is another, general code for support groups. Do you need a specific code? If yes, then rename, e.g pacient support groups? If not, merge.

  • @Wojt are you using social support similarly to social services if yes, merge to soc. services

  • @Jan and @amelia do we want to distinguish radicalisation and radicalism? and…

  • are we going to distinguish engagement and activism? E.g. social activism and social engagement … and

  • same for injustice and discrimination (e.g. fighting injustice and fighting discrimination)

  • @Wojt you have used economic liberty for Polish situation after transition form state socialism / communism, can we make this code more general, specific for the whole post-socialist countries, I’d call it post-socialist economic transition, OK? Or is the meaning and use of the code different?

  • @amelia, never heard the word mudslinging before, but, can we make it more general, like dehonesting or is that a frequently used word, or you want this specific code?

  • @Jan maybe @Richard @amelia - there need to be distinguishing between feminism (ideology, snadpoint) and feminist activism (actions), I am not sure we have such distinction in coding. Or we could merge them.

  • @amelia I think your manipulating psychology is the same as manipulation, merge?

  • @Wojt what is media good? Positive effects? Public good/service?

3 Likes
3

Regarding the structuration of actions/activites (also: activism), shouldn’t we write - here? - all codes we have for those actions? I have recoded my code do something with/against to activity. I am not sure, but it might be somehow “included” in the continuum of in/activity. At least analytically. Perhaps not in the backend. Z.

1 Like
4

Dear all (@amelia, @Wojt, @Jan, @Jirka_Kocian, and @Richard),

looking at the network view, the topic of education seems to be the biggest node in the whole network. I was thinking about it, and I am not sure that it is really that prominent. I think that this is one of the few quite general codes that also have more child codes. Same it would be with “politics” if we consistently child all relevant codes to it or to its children (such as “politicians”).

If I understand correctly, what does the network visualization shows, I think we should systematically go through all our codes and hierarchize them in the back-end. Many codes have a lower density than 5 and therefore they won’t be visible in the visualization. However, they are reflecting some area, they are aspects of some phenomenon.
However, there should be some logic in the hierarchization, but I am still unsure how this should be done. Or I do not feel competent to do that. E.g. do we want to child “ideology” to “politics” (as it is now) or should they be separate? Or emotions, do we want to put them together under one parent code? Or should we do hierarchies (and group) codes such as: now and then, nostalgia, technological development, automation, barriers to change, breaking from tradition, all the economic topics, EU funds, etc. Also, Church and/or religion is still not hierachized.

Talking about code politics and ideologies, there are codes that should be made children of one of that. Politics:voting, pluralism, political (…), populism (or this to ideologies?); Ideologies: authoritarianism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, all anti-*.
Also, I am not sure about Islamophobia, ‘patriotism’.
If you think this is correct, I can child-parent these codes or you can do it.
I have created the code chief executive for Czech and Polish top politicians as agreed. I have added all politicians to the politicians-code (e.g. Merkel, Orban, Salvini, Sanders, Putin). I have been thinking about creating also a category populist politicians as a specific, project relevant code.This would mean either to make copies of politicians who are also populists. Or abandon the code chief executive politicians and have only code politicians and it’s child populist politicians. What do you think?

I have done some parenting-childing of media (+ online / social media), also to labour. I will create a code ecology to subordinate recycling, wasting, natural environment and pollution.

I will create code urbanisation and subordinate codes such as: urban development, urban landscape, big cities, non-residential development, small town, housing policy, improving places. I will child some other codes to the code housing (such as: rent, own housing, mortgage, Airbnb).

I think codes health and healthcare are still missing related codes that are not made children to them.

1 Like
5

Hi @SZdenek! Please hold off on this as vague top level codes are not our friend. If they are too vague to be meaningful on a graph visualization we shouldn’t have them on the hierarchy — they need to exist as categories instead that are non SSNA. We need to discuss this further in a meeting if it’s confusing — it seems to be something we keep coming back to!

6

What we need to do is the opposite of what you suggest: try to get rid of meaningless/overly vague top level codes — by making them non-SSNA, like we talked about in the last meeting, using a designator like (A) next to the front of the code.

For example: health, healthcare, education, media are not good codes. They are too vague. They could be categories (and not appear on the SSNA) but not SSNA codes.

We discussed this at length in the meeting before last, and came to a consensus about the categories like these being non SSNA and us marking them with an (A). Jan felt strongly that they were useful as organizing categories but agreed that they should not appear in the SSNA by default.

1 Like
7

OK. And what will happen with all the quotes that are attached to these codes that will be made non-SSNA by using (A)? E.g. “media” has 15 quotes attached only to this code and not to its child code(s), “healthcare” 26 individual quotes coded, “education” has 156 of such. Do we have to recode them into more specific child codes if we want them to appear somehow in SSNA?

I think I am really confused. I would be glad, if someone can do the complex revision of the coding system - make (A) codes, child and parent codes, etc. and let us know what codes we need to recode.

8

Can we erase or invisibilize codes and quotes from the Serbian forum? There are few codes with * that are exclusively Serbian.

9

At this point, I vote we just delete them.

10

I have deleted some of the codes that were only with quotes from the Serbian forum. The quotes included in other codes where also quotes from other fora need to be deleted either by deleting the users, or some other way. :wink:

1 Like
11

(@rebelethno) There are asterisks by codes such as collaboration, activity, bother(ing), giving up, complaining. I think if we create a spectrum of in/activism (levels on non-involvement) we could easily recode, merge, or child some of these codes into this spectrum. … I know, this is more an analytical way of coding, but, as agreed on one of our previous meetings , this is essential to the topic of the project. (I think it was assigned to @Jan)

12

(@rebelethno) No to lose topically important codes in the SSNA-view when we cut the view to 5 or more co-occurrences, I think there need to be some parenting made wit the ideological codes such as: authoritarianism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, ‘patriotism’, anti-*(anything), etc.

Similarly, we could child xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia (maybe oikophobia) to some code, such as discrimination (where already racism is made its child). Or we could child those phobias to hate. (And also make discrimination child of hate?) What do you say?

1 Like
13

I’ll definitely give it a thought. For the moment, though, I think that the “despondency” code we already have fits neatly into the lower end of the spectrum, while “activism”, “direct action” and, more generally, “sense of agency” are, to say the least, indicative of the other extreme. What I’m trying to say is that we already have a sort of spectrum emerging. The question is, however, how granular we want it to be…is a three-grade scale not enough? (activism-indifference-despondency, with the last suggestive of a negative affect toward engagement?)

14

I think this can be recolved by introducing the “show parent codes” option that, I think, @amelia mentioned during our last meeting. Correct me if I’m wrong.

While I agree that we should parent-child them, to my mind it seems that “anxiety” would be a better candidate than hate. And I would not make “discrimination” a child of “hate”. The way I see it, hate indeed results in discrimination but is not an onthological child of it. I mean, it seems there can be a lot of discrimination without hate and there can be no cat that is not a mammal, to use the example given at some point by @alberto. If anything, I’d say that hate should be the child of discrimination/polarisation or anxiety. (See Fig. 1)
b12bb3026a66540dd8df7629df2f3f68
Figure 1

15

Dear, @rebelethno
I have two general suggestions regarding our coding practice.

  1. I personally prefer sticking to noun forms, so instead of using, say, “bother(ing)” I’d just use “bothering”. I’m also wondering about the use of adjectives and/or adverbs, as in “bilingualism” instead of “bilingual” or “fascism” instead of “fascist”. It may be purely aesthetic, so just let me know what you think.
  2. What do you think about using names of people instead of names of countries? For example, coding “Russians” instead of “Russia”? Our project does not really focus on the beauty of landscapes or geographical aspects of given places (unless those geographical aspects somehow affect the social, political and other dimensions). I just believe that whatever “Russia does” is done by its people, and whatever happens to Russia happens to its people. What I’m suggesting is a distinction between a country, seen as an entity, piece of land on the map, and a country as a collective of individuals who self-identify as members thereof. It may turn out that, in the context of Poland, “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” may not be salient enough to appear in the graph with the strength of co-occurences set to some higher values and yet BE salient enough to deserve a place on the graph.
    For example, when people talk about migrating somewhere what they really mean is changing their geographical location, and thus we should use the name of a country. But when they talk about the atmosphere in that country, some political, economic or social processes that take place there, we should code for its people (since they pertain to its people and not the land).
  3. What do you say we change the definition of “education” to something like “acquiring knowledge and learning new skills”? I’ve just visited it and it has quite a few annotations mentioning education outside of schools? Maybe we should fork it and add “formal education” or “schooling system” or sth?
    BTW I co-code it with “private sector” when somebody mentions paid courses, etc.
16

@SZdenek is right — see our agreement below:

@Jan and @Wojt , did you end up making this categorisation for us? If not, please prioritise. Thank you!

17

(@rebelethno)
The categorisation for political/ideological remains to be introduced in the form of hierarchies on the backend (I haven’t got down to it yet, forming hierarchies, most of them are purely conceptual for now).
@Jan and I came up with a seven-point scale:
Far left<->social democracy<->centrist<->conservatism<->far right
With “far right” and “far left” subdivided into their radical and extreme variants.
The difference between radical left/right and extreme left/right boils down to whether their adherents resort to and respect democratic institutions in their actions. If they are anti-democratic, they should be qualified as extreme.

There is also the code ‘neoliberalism’ for proponents of free market economy, privatisation, reducing the role of the state (and/or), who usually exhibit classist biases and are socially liberal, includes laissez-faire.

I also changed the code right wing and left wing
to ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’ (with single quotes).
I will go through their annotations and check if they need any distributing.

As for single quotes, we also have the code ‘liberalism’ used when people speak of liberalism without specifying what they mean by that. Sometimes the term liberalism is used offensively by the right as well as the left (e.g. “libki” for the Polish left, “libtards” for the American right).

18

I imagine most of these won’t be in the form of hierarchies, so just let us know in text form what they are — same with the action / activism coding scheme

1 Like
19

@SZdenek @Jirka_Kocian @Jan
Hi guys, are we meeting tomorrow? I believe tomorrow should be our biweekly coding meeting.
I and Jan can meet at 15 CET. What say you?

20

Hi. I have it in my schedule, and will be there (Lea will by at her grandmother’s place).