3. Deductive coding of text

Deductive coding is a closed top-down method for describing and analysing your material.

In this exercise, you will code text sections based on codes/categories defined in advance.

How to:

• Create three new codes: “America”, “Work”, and “Citizens”.
• This is done by going to the menu “Create” > “Code”. Write the appropriate name in the field and click “Done”.
  Repeat for all three codes.
• Open one (or more) of the speeches in NVivo by double-clicking the document. (The documents can be found under “Data”>“Files”.)
• Now code text sections with the newly created codes: Mark the relevant text section and right-click the marked section. Choose "Code Selection" > "At Existing Codes or Cases...". Choose one or more of the codes from the list and click “Select”.
• If you wish to see which codes, you have used in the document, click the top menu “Document” and then the tab “Coding Stripes”. Choose “All Codes Coding”. Your codes will now show to the right of the document. If you click on a code, all the text coded with the code in question will now be highlighted in yellow in the document.
• If you wish to highlight all text coded within the document, you once again go to the top menu “Document”. Choose the tab “Highlight” and “Coding for All Codes”. All coded text will be highlighted in yellow. You cannot choose other colours than yellow for highlighting, so if you need to know which code the highlighted text represents, you will have to look in your “Coding Stripes” to the right of the document (see bullet above).

You can find your codings in the menu “Codes”>”Codes”. Double-click a code to see which text sections you have coded with the particular code.