Hand-Coding Hardware

I was advised that sorting and memo-ing would be more easily done by hand. But I was not told as to the mechanics of that process.

After two days of trying out different things, I came to this:

• Export codes from MaxQDA into Excel
• Edit Excel file so that the relevant information fits onto a regular sized paper (make sure there are lines drawn between codes)
• Print on card-stock paper (I used regular paper the first time, and found them too flimsy to handle)
• Cut out each code into a separate strip (that's where the lines come in)

Then do the sorting/consolidating thing by asking these classic GT questions:

- What is the data a study of?

- What category does this incident indicate?

- What is actually happening in the data?

- What is the main concern being faced by the participants?

- What accounts for the continual resolving of this concern?

It was relatively easy to re-categorize them into higher level categories. (Except I'm not sure if that is what I am doing exactly.)

Then, I needed more hand-coding hardware. I took large envelopes and made little envelope strips out of them into which I inserted the various categories of codes.

I took a picture of a handful for "show and tell":

Ta dah! Clever, ne?

Well, now, I'm stuck. How do I go from my hand-coding back into software-coding? Because I still have a lot more data to code.

As they say in France, "zut alors!"