Research Methods
Thematic Analysis Coding Laboratory
Six fictional interview extracts about asking for help at university. Code them, then set your reading beside three other defensible ones over exactly the same words.
Fictional — invented extracts written for teaching, not transcripts
Learning objective
By the end you should be able to treat coding as an analytic act rather than an extraction, and defend a coding choice as one of several readings.
About 30 minutes. Anything you type stays in this browser tab and is not saved or sent anywhere.
There is no answer key here
This tool does not mark your codes and does not compare them with anyone else's for agreement. In reflexive thematic analysis the researcher is part of the analysis, so two competent analysts coding the same extract differently is expected rather than a failure of reliability. What is assessed, in real work, is whether a reading is traceable to the data, coherent, and explicit about its own assumptions.
- Answer the opening question to unlock the laboratory.
- Read the extract, then write a code of your own for it.
- Optionally tick codes from the bank and read what each one does.
- Compare with three coding passes, then answer the reflexive prompt.
First, a judgement
The laboratory
One extract at a time. The extract and your own code stay at the top of the stage, so you can see the words you are working on while you work on them.
Key terms
- Code
- A short label recording something the analyst has noticed. It is a decision with an author, not a category the extract falls into.
- Semantic and latent
- Whether a code stays with what was said, or reaches for what is being done in saying it. The two are ends of a continuum rather than separate boxes.
- Coding pass
- One route through the whole dataset. A second pass over the same words can be a different reading rather than a mistake.
- Reflexivity
- Attending to what you brought to the reading, and what that made available or hard to see.
Asking for help — six fictional extracts
A code is a short label for something you have noticed. It records a decision, so two analysts will make different ones.
Extract 1 of 6
What the codes you ticked are doing
Three coding passes over the same words
A reflexive prompt
Challenge — which of these are codes?
A student brings you the following labels, all applied to extract 4 ("I don't want to be the student who's always struggling").
What this demonstrates
Coding is a decision, and decisions have authors
A code is not sitting in the transcript waiting to be lifted out. It is a short account of what the analyst has noticed, written in the analyst's words, from a position the analyst occupies. That is why the same extract in this laboratory yields three different sets of codes without any of them being a misreading.
Semantic and latent are a continuum, not two boxes
Staying close to what is said is a real analytic choice with real costs: it keeps you honest and it can leave the pattern invisible. Reading for what is being done, or for the setting that makes a thing sayable, reaches further and owes the reader more justification. Most analyses move along this line rather than picking a point on it.
Agreement is not the criterion
In reflexive thematic analysis, two coders reaching the same codes is neither necessary nor especially reassuring: it can mean the coding frame was tight enough to prevent anyone noticing anything. What a reader is entitled to is data extracts that support the claims, an account that hangs together, and a statement of the position it was written from.
Software organises; it does not analyse
Qualitative analysis packages store codes, retrieve extracts and count them. Every interpretive act in this laboratory happened before any of that would be useful. A tidy codebook is a record of thinking, not a substitute for it.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.