Hello everyone. I conducted a research with action research. I collected data with interviews, videos, recordings, documents and researcher diary during a year , 15 hours in a week. After collected my data, I analysed them. I found 74 codes for implementation stage (3 months data).
My question is, amount of 74 codes is too much? Is there any rule that amount of codes should be under 50?
Thank you in advance for sharing your ideas with me...
Damla - there are no specific rules - other than 'subjective' advice to keep the codes to as manageable amount as possible. Action research is a labour-intensive approach - and requires multiple resources to be in place. The more codes/cycles etc - the more difficult to achieve overall pragmatic outcomes.
Damla Altin - I think the following steps may be helpful:
1) The code should be generic enough to apply to multiple comments, but specific enough to be useful in your analysis.
2) Avoid commonalities and having similar codes is okay as long as they serve different purposes.
3) Try to create codes that contrast with each other to track both the positive and negative elements of a topic separately.
4) Reduce data to a point. 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. To make your analysis as useful as possible, try to find a balance between having too many and too few codes.
5) Make sure to group responses with the same themes under the same code, even if they don’t use the same exact wording.
Remember that having too many codes can make results ambiguous and themes can overlap.
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