PU565 Unit 5 First-Cycle Coding Memo Example

Eleven Initial Codes From Six Transcripts, Each Read Twice Before Any Label Was Applied: A Unit 5 Coding Memo Documenting Familiarization and First-Cycle Coding, With the Three Codes That Collapsed Into One

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PU565: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Unit 5 Coding Memo

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The six transcripts and their speakers are composite; the analytic procedure and the research cited are real.

What Was Done, in Order

1. Six transcripts, 42 to 61 minutes each, transcribed verbatim including pauses and repetitions requested.

2. Each transcript read twice with no coding, once straight through and once with notes in the margin, before any label was applied. Familiarization before coding is the first phase of the thematic approach this study follows (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

3. One transcript coded line by line to generate candidate labels, then the remaining five coded with the growing list, adding rather than forcing. Codes were drawn from the transcripts rather than from a framework brought to them, which is the inductive route rather than the directed one (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).

4. The list reviewed against the first transcript again, which is where three codes collapsed.

The Eleven Initial Codes

1. Not yet. Statements placing action in an unspecified future without naming its condition.

2. Price as a closing move. Cost raised in a way that ends the conversation rather than inviting a solution.

3. Managing the room. Rearranging seating, position or venue to hear without disclosing.

4. Someone else noticed first. Accounts in which another person named the problem.

5. The television as evidence. Volume disputes used as the measure of the problem.

6. Age as explanation. Hearing change described as ordinary aging rather than a condition.

7. Who would see it. Attention to visibility and to specific audiences.

8. What it would say about me. Explicit identity statements about wearers, the register the stigma literature in this field describes (Wallhagen, 2010).

9. Tested and told to wait. Reasoning that rests on a clinician's earlier statement.

10. Asking people to repeat. The social cost of repetition, and the strategies for avoiding it.

11. Nobody explained the choice. Confusion about what the drugstore devices are and whether they are the same thing.

The Three That Collapsed

First-cycle coding produced separate labels for pretending to hear, nodding along and changing the subject. On the second pass against transcript one, all three were doing the same work in the data: concealing a missed utterance in the moment. They were merged into managing the room, with the three original labels retained in the codebook as examples rather than as codes. Recording the collapse matters because the merged code is now broader than any of its parts and will need splitting again if it dominates the later transcripts. Three codes that look distinct in a list can be one code in the data, and the only way to find out is to read the transcript again after the list exists.

Two Codes That Are Not Themes, and Are Being Mistaken for Them

Price as a closing move and what it would say about me are both doing a lot of work, and the temptation is to promote them now. The memo resists for a stated reason: a theme has to account for material across the data set rather than being the most quotable code, and six transcripts out of a planned 24 is too early to know whether these hold. The seminar in the next unit is where that judgment will be tested.

Disagreements With Myself

Two coding decisions remain unstable and are recorded rather than resolved. Age as explanation overlaps with not yet in four passages, since ordinary aging is also a reason to defer; the current rule assigns the passage to age as explanation only when the speaker treats the change as permanent. And tested and told to wait is arguably not a code at all but a participant characteristic, which would make it a sampling dimension instead; the memo keeps it as a code for now and flags the question for the codebook.

What the Familiarization Reading Produced That Coding Did Not

Reading twice before labeling produced one observation no code captures: five of the six participants described the problem in the third person before describing it in the first, beginning with what others say about their hearing. That pattern is in the structure of the talk rather than in its content, and a line-by-line code list cannot hold it. It is recorded in the memo as an analytic note, which is where structural observations belong until there is enough data to treat them as findings.

Next Steps

1. Code transcripts seven to twelve with this list, adding codes and recording every addition with its date.

2. Write a definition and two boundary cases for each of the eleven, which is the codebook task of Unit 8.

3. Bring the two candidate themes to seminar without a draft framework attached, so the group reacts to the codes rather than to the writer's organization of them.

4. Keep the analytic note on third-person framing visible, since it may turn out to be the most interesting result and the easiest to lose.

References

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Hsieh, H. F., & Shannon, S. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277-1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687

Wallhagen, M. I. (2010). The stigma of hearing loss. The Gerontologist, 50(1), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnp107