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Coding Moment of the Week 1

By Owen Sullivan

For the past few weeks, members of the NOISE Project have been coding responses from interviews that were conducted over the summer. During the coding process, we scan interview  answers for their main ideas, and then assign them words or phrases that capture these main themes. These words and phrases are called codes. For more information on coding, check out the video at the bottom. Each week, we’ll outline our “Moment of the Week,” in which we share an interesting coding discussion. Here’s our first!

What They Said

“Every time there’s a decision made, The whole group is called upon for feedback. I feel like there are a lot of ways that you can be heard.

Interviewee

How We Coded It

-Notice how the interviewee says, “the whole group is called upon for feedback.” Here, the interviewee is crediting the project for its strong communication. The interviewee feels that the entire group has the opportunity to contribute and share their voices. From this, we were able to apply the codes Communication and Consensus.

-Going a step further, let’s think about this sentence for a moment–if the process was truly co-created with a bottom-up approach, there would be no need for “feedback,” as all project members would be on the same page after co-creating content together.

-The notion here that certain individuals within the project perform actions, and other individuals give feedback, inherently places some individuals in a more powerful position than others.

-From this, we were able to apply the codes Top-down (leadership and instruction come from the ‘top’’ of the power hierarchy) and Gatekeeper (CBOs are gatekeepers to their communities and ISEs are the gatekeepers to the sciences.) 

-This is just one example of the way in which a mere 20 word interview snippet can reveal perspectives that connect to substantial, powerful concepts in the project.

CBOs stands for Community-based organizations.

ISEs stands for Informal science education institutions.

Coding tips by Luna Castelli.