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Douglas Ezzy wrote: > > > I think I know what Lyn means, and I've usefuly used the technique myself, > but it worries me. Using autocoding in this way encourages the researcher > to think in chunks of decontextualised text. I find it hard enough to > remember an interview as a whole as it is. But autocoding can be used to > get things going so that it reduces the need to read through interviews as > a whole. This makes it less likely that chunks will be seen in the context > of what was said in the page before or after, or at the beginning or > ending. It moves the focus away from the complexities and nuances of > intepretative process toward a more superficial analysis that takes for > granted an understanding of the general outline of people's stories etc. > This is doubly a problem if the analysis is done by someone who did not do > the interviews. As Birrell pointed out, autocoding works well to search for > specific phrases, and as Lyn rightly points out, autocoding is very useful > for fixed questions. However, it is no substitute for beginning the > analysis by reading the transcripts again and again when the analytic > approach is interpretative, and focused on meaning. But who has the time > to do that? > Perhaps it is too superficial to say, but this process of coding has always been iterative for me. That means I go through the text again and again until my eyes cross. Sometimes the pass through is coarse and superficial; sometimes I spend hours with a phrase. Autocoding is just one of the tools to tease out meaning. Like archeology - sometimes the camel-hair brush, sometimes the backhoe. Autocoding is a bit of a backhoe. It only gets used on some of the iterations. I must say, though, that even though autcoding is a backhoe, I think it has always turned up a surpirise or two. Doug points out the danger of decontextualized text, and it's true. But for me there is the other danger, of lost or buried text -- the phrase I don't notice because it is not where I expect it. The totally unimaginative autocoding device finds those unexpectedly-contexted phrases as well as the ones I would have predicted. Like the second-century Roman coins found in South India: by being discovered in a surprising context they establish an unexpected connection. Birrell Walsh MicroTimes who should be coding, not pontificating. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%