Coding Qualitative Data: How to Code

Qualitative Research
How many hours have you spent sitting in front of Excel spreadsheets trying to find new
insights from customer feedback?

You know that asking open-ended survey questions gives you more actionable insights
than asking your customers for just a numerical Net Promoter Score (NPS). But when
you ask open-ended, free-text questions, you end up with hundreds (or even
thousands) of free-text responses. 

How can you turn all of that text into quantifiable, applicable information about your
customers’ needs and expectations? 

By coding qualitative data.

Keep reading to learn:

 What coding qualitative data means (and why it’s important)

 Different methods of coding qualitative data
 How to manually code qualitative data to find significant themes

What is coding in qualitative research?

Coding is the process of labeling and organizing your qualitative data to identify different
themes and the relationships between them. 

When coding customer feedback, you assign labels to words or phrases that represent
important (and recurring) themes in each response. These labels can be words,
phrases, or numbers; we recommend using words or short phrases, since they’re easier
to remember, skim, and organize. 
Coding qualitative research to find common themes and concepts is part of thematic
analysis, which is part of qualitative data analysis. Thematic analysis extracts themes
from text by analyzing the word and sentence structure. 

What is qualitative data analysis?

Qualitative data analysis is the process of examining and interpreting qualitative data
to understand what it represents.

Qualitative data is defined as any non-numerical data; when looking at customer

feedback, qualitative data usually refers to any open-ended responses to surveys.

For example, NPS can be a strictly quantitative measure; when you have qualitative

data analysis methods in place, you can add context to numerical responses by
understanding the comments that customers leave alongside them. 

Why is it important to code qualitative data?

Coding qualitative data makes it easier to interpret customer feedback. Assigning codes
to words and phrases in each response helps capture what the response is about
which, in turn, helps you better analyze and summarize the results of the entire survey. 

Researchers use coding and other qualitative data analysis processes to help them
make data-driven decisions based on customer feedback. When you use coding to
analyze your customer feedback, you can quantify the common themes in customer
language. This makes it easier to accurately interpret and analyze customer
satisfaction. 

Automated vs. manual coding of qualitative data

Methods of coding qualitative data fall into two categories: automated coding and
manual coding. 

You can automate the coding of your qualitative data with thematic analysis
software (like Thematic). Thematic analysis and qualitative data analysis software use
 machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP) to
code your qualitative data and break text up into themes. 

Thematic analysis software is autonomous, which means…

 You don’t need to set up themes or categories in advance.

 You don’t need to train the algorithm — it learns on its own.
 You can easily capture the “unknown unknowns” to identify themes you may not have
spotted on your own.

…all of which will save you time (and lots of unnecessary headaches) when analyzing
your customer feedback.

To learn more about how thematic analysis software helps you automate the data
coding process, check out this article. 

How to manually code qualitative data

For the rest of this post, we’ll focus on manual coding. Different researchers have
different processes, but manual coding usually looks something like this:

1. Choose whether you’ll use deductive or inductive coding.

2. Read through your data to get a sense of what it looks like. Assign your first set of
codes.
3. Go through your data line-by-line to code as much as possible. Your codes should
become more detailed at this step. 
4. Categorize your codes and figure out how they fit into your coding frame.
5. Identify which themes come up the most — and act on them.

Let’s break it down a little further…

Deductive coding vs. inductive coding 

Before you start qualitative data coding, you need to decide which codes you’ll use.
 Deductive coding means you start with a predefined set of codes, then assign those
codes to the new qualitative data. These codes might come from previous research, or
you might already know what themes you’re interested in analyzing. Deductive coding is
also called concept-driven coding. 

For example, let’s say you’re conducting a survey on customer experience. You want to
understand the problems that arise from long call wait times, so you choose to make
“wait time” one of your codes before you start looking at the data. 

The deductive approach can save time and help guarantee that your areas of interest
are coded. But you also need to be careful of bias; when you start with predefined
codes, you have a bias as to what the answers will be. Make sure you don’t miss other
important themes by focusing too hard on proving your own hypothesis.  

Inductive coding, also called open coding, starts from scratch and creates codes
based on the qualitative data itself. You don’t have a set codebook; all codes arise
directly from the survey responses.

Here’s how inductive coding works:

1. Break your qualitative dataset into smaller samples.

2. Read a sample of the data.
3. Create codes that will cover the sample.
4. Reread the sample and apply the codes.
5. Read a new sample of data, applying the codes you created for the first sample.
6. Note where codes don’t match or where you need additional codes.
7. Create new codes based on the second sample.
8. Go back and recode all responses again.
9. Repeat from step 5 until you’ve coded all of your data.

If you add a new code, split an existing code into two, or change the description of a
code, make sure to review how this change will affect the coding of all responses.
Otherwise, the same responses at different points in the survey could end up with
different codes.
Sounds like a lot of work, right? Inductive coding is an iterative process, which means it
takes longer and is more thorough than deductive coding. But it also gives you a more
complete, unbiased look at the themes throughout your data. 

Categorize your codes with coding frames

Once you create your codes, you need to put them into a coding frame. A coding frame
represents the organizational structure of the themes in your research. There are two
types of coding frames: flat and hierarchical.

A flat coding frame assigns the same level of specificity and importance to each code.
While this might feel like an easier and faster method for manual coding, it can be
difficult to organize and navigate the themes and concepts as you create more and
more codes. It also makes it hard to figure out which themes are most important, which
can slow down decision making. 

Hierarchical frames help you organize codes based on how they relate to one another.
For example, you can organize the codes based on your customers’ feelings on a
certain topic:
 In this coding qualitative data example:

1. The top-level code describes the topic (customer service)

2. The mid-level code specifies whether the sentiment is positive or negative 
3. The third level details the attribute or specific theme associated with the topic

Hierarchical framing supports a larger code frame and lets you organize codes based
on organizational structure. It also allows for different levels of granularity in your
coding.  

Whether your code frames are hierarchical or flat, your code frames should be flexible.
Manually analyzing survey data takes a lot of time and effort; make sure you can use
your results in different contexts.
 For example, if your survey asks customers about customer service, you might only use
codes that capture answers about customer service. Then you realize that the same
survey responses have a lot of comments about your company’s products. To learn
more about what people say about your products, you may have to code all of the
responses from scratch! A flexible coding frame covers different topics and insights,
which lets you reuse the results later on. 

Tips for coding qualitative data

Now that you know the basics of coding your qualitative data, here are some tips on
making the most of your qualitative research. 

Use a codebook to keep track of your codes 

As you code more and more data, it can be hard to remember all of your codes off the
top of your head. Tracking your codes in a codebook helps keep you organized
throughout the data analysis process. Your codebook can be as simple as an Excel
spreadsheet or word processor document. As you code new data, add new codes to
your codebook and reorganize categories and themes as needed. 

Make sure to track:

 The label used for each code

 A description of the concept or theme the code refers to
 Who originally coded it
 The date that it was originally coded or updated
 Any notes on how the code relates to other codes in your analysis

Create high-quality codes

Your codes should do these 4 things:

1. Cover as many survey responses as possible. The code should be generic enough to

apply to multiple comments, but specific enough to be useful in your analysis. For example,
“Product” is a broad code that will cover a variety of responses — but it’s also pretty vague.
What about the product? On the other hand, “Product stops working after using it for 3 hours” is
 very specific and probably won’t apply to many responses. “Poor product quality” or “short
product lifespan” might be a happy medium.
2. Avoid commonalities. Having similar codes is okay as long as they serve different
purposes. “Customer service” and “Product” are different enough from one another, while
“Customer service” and “Customer support” may have subtle differences but should likely be
combined into one code.
3. Capture the positive and the negative. Try to create codes that contrast with each
other to track both the positive and negative elements of a topic separately. For example,
“Useful product features” and “Unnecessary product features” would be two different codes to
capture two different themes.
4. Reduce data — to a point. Let’s look at the two extremes: There are as many codes as
there are responses, or each code applies to every single response. In both cases, the coding
exercise is pointless; you don’t learn anything new about your data or your customers. To make
your analysis as useful as possible, try to find a balance between having too many and too few
codes.

Group responses based on themes, not wording

Make sure to group responses with the same themes under the same code, even if they
don’t use the same exact wording. For example, a code such as “cleanliness” could
cover responses including words and phrases like:

 Clean
 Tidy
 Dirty
 Dusty
 Looked like a dump
 Could eat off the floor

Having only a few codes and hierarchical framing makes it easier to group different
words and phrases under one code. If you have too many codes, especially in a flat
frame, your results can become ambiguous and themes can overlap. Manual coding
also requires the coder to remember or be able to find all of the relevant codes; the
more codes you have, the harder it is to find the ones you need, no matter how
organized your codebook is. 
 Make accuracy a priority
Manually coding qualitative data means that the coder’s cognitive biases can influence
the coding process. For each study, make sure you have coding guidelines and training
in place to keep coding reliable, consistent, and accurate.

One thing to watch out for is definitional drift, which occurs when the data at the
beginning of the data set is coded differently than the material coded later. Check for
definitional drift across the entire dataset and keep notes with descriptions of how the
codes vary across the results. 

If you have multiple coders working on one team, have them check one another’s
coding to help eliminate cognitive biases.

Conclusion: 6 main takeaways for coding

qualitative data
Here are 6 final takeaways for manually coding your qualitative data:

1. Coding is the process of labeling and organizing your qualitative data to identify themes.
After you code your qualitative data, you can analyze it just like numerical data. 
2. Inductive coding (without a predefined code frame) is more difficult, but less prone to
bias, than deductive coding.
3. Code frames can be flat (easier and faster to use) or hierarchical (more powerful and
organized).
4. Your code frames need to be flexible enough that you can make the most of your results
and use them in different contexts.
5. When creating codes, make sure they cover several responses, contrast one another,
and strike a balance between too much and too little information.
6. Consistent coding = accuracy. Establish coding procedures and guidelines and keep an
eye out for definitional drift in your qualitative data analysis.