A codebook is a complete set of codes organized into code families. Take a look at this codebook that was created for a project that elevated 850+ firsthand experiences around COVID-19 vaccine confidence and community resilience from communities served by the NYC Department of Mental Health and Hygiene’s (DoHMH) Public Health Corps (PHC):
As you can see, there are 6 parent codes and 18 child codes. In order to arrive at a codebook, there are several steps you can take to ideate as a team. See our articles on Bottom-up vs. Top-down Coding, Merging and Expanding your Codes, and Questions to Ask when Consolidating Your Codebook for more guidance.
The codebook is your analytical tool for making sense of your conversation collection.
In Fora Insights, you will tag highlights from your conversation collection with codes from this codebook.
Each code has a parenthesis next to its name, indicating how many times that code was used to tag highlights in the collection. The number next to the parent code indicates how many times each child code was used below.
In this example, child codes in the family “Intrinsic Motivations” were tagged a total of 136 times throughout the collection, including the child codes “fear of virus” (tagged 94 times), “getting back to normal” (tagged 24 times) and “basic decisions on data” (tagged 18 times).