(Part 4 of 5 from the series: 5 Steps to Mastering Qualitative Data Analysis)

So you’re done taking a first pass at coding. Nice! The goal of coding is to separate the content from the fluff, while marking your meaningful content with appropriate themes.

The next step is to review the work we’ve done and look for redundant codes, groups of similar codes and categories that need to be split up.

Fortunately, Qualrus puts everything we need in one place: the Code Editor.

The Code Editor

Go up to “Editors > Codes” to access the Code Editor. The left window pane lists all the codes you’ve created in the project. Click on a code to highlight it. The upper right window contains four tabs with information about the selected code. For now, let’s look at the “Segments” tab.

The “Segments” tab lists every segment tagged with the selected code across your entire project. The segment appears in green, attached codes in blue and information about the segment’s source and position in black. You can click on the green text to jump directly to the segment in the original source.

Start by browsing through each code to get a sense of its segments. Look for any inconsistency in the coding, codes that can be combined, or codes that should be divided.

If you need to recode something, just jump directly to the segment and edit the segment’s coding using the coding form.

Identifying representative quotes

While you’re browsing each segment per code, it might be a good idea to identify segments that are particularly illuminating. You’ll probably want to include some sample quotes for each category of codes in your final report, so go ahead and mark those down now.

When you see a good quote segment, just click the green text, jump to the segment and add a code called “Quote”. At the end of your project, you can easily generate a report containing all these quotes and plug them right into your paper.

Linking codes

In most projects, codes represent different levels of information, where certain codes are a subset of another, more general code. Creating a simple hierarchy of codes can be accomplished using links.

Highlight a code you’d like to link, then click on the “Links” tab (upper right pane). The selected code will appear as the “Subject”. Choose “isa” from the Link drop down selection, then the other code to link as the “Object”. You will see the link appear on the code graph in the lower right window. You’ve basically told the program that the first code (subject) is a (or “isa”) child of the second code (object).

Go through your project and sort your codes into parent categories. You may have to create new codes to represent new categories.

Generalizing codes

While linking some codes, you may have noticed two codes that represent the same thing. To combine these two codes along with their connected segments, we’ll use the QTools Generalize tool. “Tools > QTools” in the main menu will bring up the QTools menu. Find the “Generalize” tab.

Select the two codes you’d like to combine in the drop down menus labeled “Select code pair” (upper left). At the bottom of the left column, click “Generalize X and Y”. Choose what type of replacement you would like to do and click OK.

Generalizing is a powerful feature that you cannot undo, so make sure to backup your project before using this tool.

QTools, coding video and more

At this point, all of your important content is contained in a segment. This allows you to use every tool in Qualrus to view, sort, refine and categorize your data.

Check out the other QTools available – especially Search, Coincidental Codes, Refine and Statistics. Most of them are pretty easy to understand and can help improve the accuracy of your coding.

For a more in-depth walkthru on this step, check out our Coding and Code Editor Training Video.