#4 Eeek - starting coding!

I have now completed “stage one” of my thematic analysis plan (see #2); to familiarise myself with the data by cross checking the written transcripts with the audio.

I have spent three hours this afternoon performing the initial coding of the first transcript (“stage two”). I’ve got about two-thirds of the way through and I have fifteen transcripts to do so it’s going to be a long process, although I’m sure I’ll get quicker!

I wanted to blog my initial thoughts on my coding framework after trying to code the first transcript. I am obviously expecting that this will be developed further as I progress through more data and re-visit the transcripts again.

As I wrote last time, remember Braun & Clarke said: “some of the worst examples of ‘thematic’ analysis we have read have simply used the questions put to participants as the ‘themes’ identified in the ‘analysis’ – although in such instances, no analysis has really been done at all!”. So, the themes in my coding framework still need to come from the data! It is important not to project my group interview question guide onto the coding framework directly, but there will obviously be some similarities, given participants answered the questions I asked!

Below is a schema of the “preparedness toolbox” I put to participants as part of the introduction to the group interviews, around which questions were based.

And below is a simple diagram of my coding framework (v1.0), as it currently stands after coding the first transcript.

My thought processes were:

1) Knowledge and skills should be different parent themes - they are very different

2) Behaviours, awarenesses and personal attributes could be collapsed into ’professional competencies’. Cake et al, (2016)’s BEME systematic review defined professional competencies by exclusion, as those veterinary competencies that are not discipline-specific technical knowledge or technical psychomotor skills. Hodgson et al. (2013) similarly defined them as those competencies that go “beyond the medical, surgical and technical knowledge and skills traditionally emphasised in veterinary training”.

3) From "stage one" of thematic analysis (data familiarisation) it became clear that feedback, reflection and communication skills were going to be important themes and probably larger than a single code, which can also sit under ‘professional competencies’

4) I have, in the first instance, formed two levels of parent themes as shown, with granular codes sat in all buckets.

A screenshot from NVivo is up next. In blue & green are the parent themes from the diagram above and in yellow are the individual codes I have produced from the data so far:

I will keep going with initial coding and update the blog if/when there are major revisions to the framework!

References

Cake et al, 2016 https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2016.1173662

Hodgson et al, 2013: https://doi.org/10.3138/jvme.1012-092R