Once your team has reached the draft of your Codebook, following the Codebook Creation Module, and commenced tagging highlights in Fora Insights, you may find the need to edit your codebook for the purpose of consolidating or combining ideas.
Consolidation can benefit your project by giving you a sharper, more accurate analytical tool for making sense of your conversation collection. Below are suggested questions for your team to ask each other in order to edit your codebook.
Keep in mind, codebook creation and consolidation relies on your intuition, knowledge of the participants in your conversation collection, and other contextual factors related to your project.
- Which child codes have been tagged the most and which have been tagged the least?
Just because a code has been used several times more than another code does not mean that it is more significant. A code used only once or twice can still hold significance for the themes you are deriving from your conversation collection. Identifying the most tagged codes can give you a sense of where there is agreement on your team about salient themes in the conversation collection. The least tagged codes may give you a sense of what topics may need a deeper dive.
- Where do we see similar sentiments conveyed across code families?
Are there any repeated codes in your codebook? Repetition is not necessarily redundant, as one code within a family may have a different meaning than being in another. Take the example below. The child code “empathy” under the parent code “unique culture” may have a distinct meaning as compared to “empathy” under the parent code “belonging.” You may decide to keep “empathy” in both families, remove the code from one family, or you may decide “empathy” deserves to be its own parent code to start a new code family. Use this as an opportunity to debate with your team the meaning of each code and its significance in your codebook.