So, in qualitative research, the data would be in the form of field notes, a narrative produced by someone, or possibly written documents or archival material. Coding is the process of categorizing sections, or paragraph. It is a way of seeing which parts of the data are connected to one another in terms of some issue, concept, theme, or hypothesis. Some researchers use different terms, such as “thematic analysis,” or data analysis strategies that basically involve categorizing the data (Seidman, 1998) Table 16.1 gives an example of this. It shows a few sections of the transcript of an in-depth interview on the right-hand side and the codes that the researcher applied to each section on the left. These interviews were conducted as a part of a study of how people with chronic lionesses experience time and personal identity. You can see the conceptual codes that the researcher identified, many of them having to do with self-esteem and feelings about oneself. These are the concepts that this researcher identified as important in each part of what was said in the interview. Approaches to Coding. There are three approaches to developing coding schemes that are used by qualitative researchers. One is to create a fairly complete coding scheme prior to going out into the field to collect observations (Miles and Huberman, 1994). This would be based on theoretical considerations. Regarding what will be observed in the field, what are the important variables, social mechanisms, and causal processes. This approach might rely on prior research or on preexisting coding schemes that had been developed by others and used in research on similar topics. For example, a qualitative evaluation of a high school mental health program involved coding focus group responses according to four topics: (1) positive aspects of the program, (2) suggestions for improving services, (3) how to reach youth in need of mental health service, and (4) ideas for measuring treatment outcomes (Nabors, Reynolds, and Weist, 2000). Examples of coding categories included therapist behaviors and academic, personal, and neighborhood changes. This coding scheme can be readily adapted to studies of similar programs. When using this approach, the list of coding categories should be fairly complete, in terms of what the observer expects to see in the field, and may be quite detailed and approach to coding from what is done by most quantitative researchers is that the qualitative researcher still expects to change and adapt the coding scheme as observations are made in the field. With almost any coding scheme, some categories will prove useful, others less so. Some categories might not be used at all whereas others are used too much-so many observations fall into the category that it needs to be divided into subcategories based on difference among the various observations. So, the coding scheme continues to develop as the data are collected.