One author compiled student responses by typing each response into a single document and giving each response a number tag so that individual cases could be tracked. In an exploratory fashion, the student responses were read, reread, and rearranged to determine the emergent themes for each question. Once the general themes, or categories, were determined, each author followed the constant comparative method by separately coding the numbered student responses into the determined categories. To illustrate how these codings were compiled and analyzed, consider an example of ten student responses (#1 – #10) to a question that has two conceptual categories, ‘a’ and ‘b.’ Table 1 shows how each rater in this example coded each student response. The raters agreed that four responses (N = 4) fit
in Category ‘a’ and three responses (N = 3) fit in Category ‘b.’ The raters did not agree on the categorization of two responses (#5 and #9). For example, Rater 1 coded response #5 in Category ‘b’ while Rater 2 coded it in Category ‘a.’ Also note that both raters deemed response #2 inapplicable to the question.