Developing a Coding System for Narratives Posted on February 16, 2006 Barbara H. Fiese (bio) stresses that a coding system should be based on the underlying purpose of the study.

Deciding on coding systems for narratives. Well, I think that the first thing you have to ask yourself is what you want to get out of this data. Do you have a set of data that illustrates let's say perhaps a very unique sort of situation where you were able to interview people after a crisis like the tsunami or after 9/11, and it provides a really sort of unique once in a lifetime kind of experience? If that's the purpose of collecting the narrative and to really understand how this unique experience is being processed or thought about, you're probably going to want to look at some sort of thematic coding scheme. You're going to pull out some sort of themes. You may have some ideas beforehand what those things might look like, but probably for the richness of the data, you're going to want to just spend a lot of time reading through them and perhaps use a more grounded theory approach to pull out the themes. If you're looking at using narratives as a way to sort of chart socialization practices or value laden kind of practices, you can also use sort of a thematic content analysis, and we would probably start the same way by spending a lot of time reading through the transcript, identifying themes, getting somebody else to take a look at it; triangulate it if possible with the people who gave you the interviews. If you're looking, though, at using narratives as a marker or a way in which people make sense out of their lives whether it's related to identity issues or attachment related issues or relationship in the family types of issues, then you're probably going to want to look more at the overall coherence of the narrative. That's probably the most difficult kind of coding to do.

« Back to Article