The work in creating an ethnography is extensive and involves combining many different parts. Some things that ethnographers do includes conducting field work and interviews. After this is completed, ethnographers would need to make use of the information that they have collected. One of the steps in doing so is to review the field notes that were created and code them into useful information relevant to the overall research topic. Professor Alan Bryman thought up four stages in completing qualitative analysis on a text that has just been written. The first stage involves reading over the text and making notes at the end, looking out for major themes and unusual events. The second stage entails reading the text over a second time, while starting to make annotations in the margins, labelling the codes, and noting any analytic ideas. The third stage is when the ethnographer would review the codes that were made and refine them by removing redundant codes and starting to connect codes together. In the final stage, the ethnographer will analyze the codes that were made and connect it with the research topic and other codes that were created (Gibbs “Part 1”).
The purpose of coding is to make it easier to connect information that the ethnographer collected and relate it back to the research idea. Coding labels the information that the interviewer collected and assists in the accessibility this information to be used. Keeping this in mind, ethnographers would write thorough and clear annotations from stages one through three because it will only benefit them when writing later. When coding, it is necessary to label all the relevant information with thematic coding, which means to code them with broad ideas that connects codes with each other (Gibbs “Part 2”). In doing so, it will be easier to connect these codes to the major idea of the project. It would also help in labelling where specific ideas are throughout the whole text, making it even easier to find. After completing all of the codes, it is necessary to write them all on a separate page and list them in order. Coding hierarchy is something that is done and completed in stage 4 of Alan Bryman’s qualitative analysis. This organization will put them starting from the most important or frequent code to the less important ones (Gibbs “Part 5”). In doing so, it emphasizes the significance of the interviews to the project and the common themes that came up between all the interviews and field work done.
Knowledge of coding helps to make sense of field notes by organizing entire excerpts into specific blocks of information that are needed in the research project. The whole point of coding is to make notes easier to understand and make them readily available to relate back to the research topic. Like all other types of analytical work, coding helps to make sense of information collected and its relation to the project. Ethnographers engage in interviews with many different people and collect a lot observational field work to complete their project. In order to assist themselves in completing their project, they code their collection so that the information that they need would be extremely accessible when attempting to find it. From this knowledge, I know that coding my notes for an ethnography project will help me greatly in supporting my argument.
Works Cited
Gibbs, Graham R. “Coding Part 1: Alan Bryman's 4 Stages of Qualitative Analysis.”YouTube, YouTube, 24 Oct. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X7VuQxPfpk.
Gibbs, Graham R. “Coding Part 2: Thematic Coding.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 Oct. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_YXR9kp1_o.
Gibbs, Graham R. “Coding Part 5: The Code List or Code Hierarchy.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 Oct. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVpkuTdkZvA&t=1s.