Have you chosen a qualitative method for your research and now face the challenge of creating your first codes, categories, or themes through inductive coding?
And what does that even mean?
In this article, I will walk you through the entire process of inductive coding using a step-by-step example.
At the end of this tutorial, you will have everything you need to start coding your own qualitative data.
Inductive Coding in Qualitative Research
Inductive coding is a specific technique in qualitative research. Whether follow the recommendations of thematic analysis, content analysis, or grounded theory — all these approaches involve some form of inductive coding.
However, if you read a methods book for the first time, you might be confused about how to actually do it.
So, let’s do it together.
The Process of Inductive Coding (Example)
For our example, let’s assume you are working on a thesis about “Collaboration Using Virtual Reality in the Workplace.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, a company sent VR headsets to 10 employees and held weekly team meetings in a VR app.
You are now accompanying this study by interviewing the 10 employees about their experiences as part of your thesis.
It is important to lay the right foundation for analyzing your interviews before you even conduct them.
This means that you have a broad research objective or a more concrete research question in mind before you start your interviews.
The good thing about qualitative research is that it’s often very exploratory, looking at new and emerging topics and phenomena. This fits well with an inductive analysis, which entails that you do not have a strong theoretical framing, that you use to guide your analysis.
For mainly inductive qualitative research, you therefore need a slightly broader research question and can start without a specific theory in mind! For your interview questions, this means that they are very open, and you lead the interview to where it gets interesting, rather than structuring your questions strictly according to a theory you read about.
A suitable overarching question for our example would be, “How do knowledge workers collaborate on a team-level when using a virtual reality application?”
You can get more specific if you think is question has been addressed multiple times in previous research, but for simplicity, we’ll stick with this research question for the sake of this video.
In your literature review, you aim to become an expert in this area and check if you find helpful papers that you could build on to solve a more narrow problem that previous research has not tackled.
Deductive Approach
A deductive approach would look quite different. Suppose the company’s employees work with heavy machinery and already need to concentrate a lot. Here, you could use a theory like the “Cognitive Load Theory” to design your interview questions and guide your analysis. The theory provides specific dimensions to structure your study. These are, if you will, pre-made categories into which you sort your data, i.e., the interview quotes.
Your interview data analysis then follows a deductive approach, based on the predetermined theoretical framework.
But now let’s see how we can create codes from scratch, in a bottom-up, inductive fashion.
Inductive Coding
Inductive coding means that your codes emerge (inductively) from the material itself.
Codes are just labels that summarize a bunch of similar data. So if 3 of the employees talk about a similar issue they encountered, you give these parts in your interview transcript the same code, like “being overwhelmed by the functionalities of the virtual meeting room”.
The goal is to reduce or summarize all your material, in our example, all 10 interviews, to the essentials.
This means that you want to end up with a list of codes that are representative of your entire dataset in relation to your research objective. If someone looks at that list, they know exactly what the interviewees experienced when collaborating in VR.
This also means that, if something that people said is not relevant to team collaboration in VR, you don’t need to code it.
To make it a little easier, you can follow these 7 steps to build your first inductive codes.
5 Steps of Inductive Coding
- Determine the Unit of Analysis: In our example, this would be each complete statement of an employee about their VR collaboration experience.
- Paraphrase the Statements: This means cleaning up the statements from unnecessary details and writing them down clearly.
- In our example, it could look like this: From “I often had problems with dizziness during fast movements in our VR meeting,” it becomes “dizziness during fast movements.”
- Set the Level of Abstraction: Be aware of how far you need to go from your material to a code, which may consist of only two or three words. It usually makes sense to perform two so-called reductions, for example, from a whole paraphrased sentence to a shorter code. The level of abstraction is then raised later in your analysis. After you have a list of maybe 50 initial codes or so, you can further summarize them and make them more abstract. Then you end up with 6 or 7 categories or themes, which are more abstract than your initial codes. How this abstraction works depends on the approach you use. While the first step, the initial list of codes is pretty similar in all qualitative methods that involve inductive coding, the steps that follow can be quite different. Please watch my method-specific tutorials on thematic analysis, grounded theory and so on, if you want to learn more.
- Summarize the Statements into Codes: In inductive coding, it’s important to go through the statements one by one and assign each one to a code. If the next statement is “I had some difficulties when I was trying to take notes with the VR controller”, you check if this fits into the existing code “dizziness during fast movements” If not, you create a new one, like “difficulties with handling the hardware.”
- Review: Your list of codes gradually forms. At first, it makes sense to create more different codes rather than fewer. If you find your list contains 57 codes and many are similar, you can perform another summarization step and just merge those that are very similar. Reviewing means going back to the original material and comparing it with your list of codes. Does the list of codes appropriately reflect what the employees said?
Common Pitfalls in Inductive Coding
I often observe that the guidance from methods books, especially on inductive coding, is perceived too dogmatically. Students often fear that deviating from the guidelines could be “wrong”.
This is commendable, but if you reach a point with your data where the next step that a methods book suggest doesn’t work for you, it’s up to you as a researcher to make an independent methodological decision, do it differently, and justify it in your methods section.
You can and should deviate from the plan if necessary. Qualitative methods are not a standard instrument that always look the same. They must be adapted to the specific material and constructed towards the specific research question.
As long as you proceed systematically, justify your decisions, and describe them precisely, everything will be fine.