An overview of the inductive coding process is shown in Table 2. The intended outcome of
the process is to create a small number of summary categories (e.g., between three and eight categories)
that in the evaluator’s view capture the key aspects of the themes identified in the raw
data and are assessed to be the most important themes given the evaluation objectives. Inductive
coding that finishes up with many major themes (e.g., more than eight) can be viewed as incomplete.
In this case, some of the categories may need combining, or the evaluator must make hard
decisions about which themes or categories are most important.