Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 493
you can isolate for any text. When I was in high school, my physics teacher
put a bottle of Coca-Cola on his desk and challenged our class to come up
with interesting ways to describe that bottle. Each day for weeks that bottle
sat on his desk as new physics lessons were reeled off, and each day new
suggestions for describing that bottle were dropped on the desk on the way
out of class.
I don’t remember how many descriptors we came up with, but there were
dozens. Some were pretty lame (pour the contents into a beaker and see if the
boiling point was higher or lower than that of sea water) and some were pretty
imaginative (cut off the bottom and test its magnifying power), but the point
was to show us that there was no end to the number of things we could
describe (measure) about that Coke bottle, and the point sunk in. I remember
it every time I try to code a text.
Inductive and Deductive Coding
Grounded-theory research is mostly based on inductive or ‘‘open’’ coding.
The idea is to become grounded in the data and to allow understanding to
emerge from close study of the texts. That’s why Barney Glaser and Anslem
Strauss (1967), the originators of this approach, titled their book The Discovery
of Grounded Theory.
Content analysis (which we’ll take up in the next section) is mostly based
on deductive coding. In doing deductive analysis of text, you start with a
hypothesis before you start coding. The idea is to test whether your hypothesis
is correct. Inductive research is what you do when you’re in the exploratory
and discovery phase of any research project, whether your data are words or
numbers. Deductive research is what you do in the confirmatory stage of any
research project—no matter what kind of data you have. There is no point in
talking about which is better. They’re both terrific if you use them to answer
appropriate questions.
How to Find Themes
For inductive research, like grounded theory, you can’t go wrong by just
reading the texts and underlining or highlighting things as you go. You can get
fancy later (more about this in a minute), but when you start to work with a
corpus of written text, just read it and if you see something that you think
might be important, highlight it. Some of the words and phrases you highlight
will turn into names for themes. In fact, Strauss and Corbin (1990:68) recommend
explicitly using actual phrases your text—the words of real people—to
name themes, a technique they call in vivo coding.