Saldaña’s text actually gets into the nitty-gritty of qualitative coding and offers many models for how to code. We went over coding but stopped with grounded theory methods.
I took one graduate course that was useful but had to cram so many methods into a relatively short period of time. Like many compositionists, my background in research methods is rather limited. Becky Rickly introduced me to it a couple of years ago, but I had no idea what coding was (“Wait, it’s not about HTML?”) or that I would eventually use it in my dissertation. I cannot emphasize how important, useful, and accessible this book is for anyone who is interested in coding data. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchersby Johnny Saldaña (2012) Luckily, there are some great resources that currently exist to organize the research process, facilitate coding, and analyze and visualize data. Can you imagine if my term had been even more generic like process? Needless to say, even 1700 instances of a term can be a lot for one researcher to handle. I started my research with a quick search in JSTOR and other databases to see how many times “community” shows up in the 64 volumes of CCC, and I got a manageable 1700 hits. I’m looking at how “community” has been used historically as a term in the journal College Composition and Communication in order to understand (1) what compositionists mean when we say “community”, (2) how this definition has shifted over the past ~70 years, and (3) what that means for “community” and composition today. Currently I’m waiting on my IRB approval to get started on collecting data from real people, so while I’m in a holding pattern I’ve started to work on my first chapter.
The dissertation has several moving parts including two national surveys, follow-up interviews, and classroom observations. I’ve recently started my dissertation project research.
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