"Coding is an important technique in qualitative research such as anthropology, ethnography and other observer and participant-observer methods."
When we are given Ethnograpic data to code are overall main objective to find meaningful 'chunks' of data and condense them down to a size that can be easily interpretated, without the need to filter through extensive amounts of data each time. As we condense the data into smaller pieces we can begin to apply a coding scheme to the discussion i.e.
Agent: "London is a good starting point" GIVE_INFO.LOC
Customer: "Sounds good, but what country is that in?" ASK_Q.LOC
Agent: "Before we get started we'll need to discuss flights" GIVE_INF.FLIGHT
There coding schemes are used to describe what the utterances are doing. So to explain further; if you look are the above example you will note that after the agent has mentioned "London is a good starting point" we are then present with the coding (give_info.loc) which is basically telling us that the agent is giving the customer information about a location. On the next line we can tell by using the coding that the customer is then asking a question (Q) about the location (.loc).
I have taken a brief instance of a discussion from a video about a travel agency and created a transcript of what had been discussed and I have then applied coding to create the following:
Customer: "ok that's great"
Coding: ANS_INFO.FLIGHT
Agent: "that would actually go from Perth to Singapore and then across to South Africa"
Coding: GIVE_INFO.LOC
Customer: "I'd be quite happy to do that"
Coding: ANS_INFO.FLIGHT
Agent: "the only thing is a lot of these fares are based on mileage. Now most of them will give you 29,000 miles"
Coding: GIVE_INFO.COST
The graph (displayed above) displays the amount of times that the utterance types; Flight, Loc (Location) and Cost appear during the discussion transcript mentioned earlier. The objective of this graph is to conduct research into finding out what is the most common occuring theme from the earlier transcripts.
As you can see from the graph that 3 out of the 5 utterances related to and concerned Flight which translates to 60% of the selected data. These findings go on to show that when booking a holiday the main discussion takes place around Flights with Locations and Cost coming in at a joint second. So we can see now that one of the main problems, when trying to sell holidays to the general public the most important area they will be concerned with 70% of the time is the Flight and its corresponding information. Of course it is easy to identify what the main problem is but moving on to finding a solution provides an entirely different problem in itself; so the holiday sales person will need to link in all other information (location, cost etc) under the umbrella of Flights and its information to provide the customer with enough data that will promote the holiday to them and thus making a sale.
In conlusion; the above discussion was the form of a quantitative analysis on qualitative data and what we have discussed here is the ability of integrating both, qualitative and quantitative data together which provided us with results showing what one of the problems is concerning selling holidays.
