From our CEO, Eli Lieber – As a follow up to our last post on building solid and useful code systems, we want to help bring everyone up to speed on another dimension you can bring to your qualitative research from a mixed methods perspective—code ratings/weights.  I was first introduced to this idea when learning about the Ecocultural Family Interview (EFI) model.  The EFI is really more an approach to exploring a research question through studying the activities and routines or your research population.  For example, our demo project data come from a study of emergent literacy development in children who attend Head Start programs. Thus, it was important to understanding what was happening in the homes of these families that might support the development of the skills kids need when it comes time to learn to read.  Our approach was to interview moms about home activities and routines related to literacy related experiences.  One key theme we focused on was reading events—when mom reads to the child, when others read to the child, what those reading episodes look like, and how they vary.  Needing to developing codes like ‘Reading by Mother’ and ‘Reading by Others’ was pretty obvious to tag excerpts where moms were talking about these things.  But to take things further, and core to the EFI model, is the question of whether we could also classify these excerpts along some dimension.

If so, what might this ‘dimension’ look like? Find out this and more in our article here!

So, go use your imagination, fire up Dedoose, define your tag weighting/rating systems, and see your data come to life in entirely new and ‘AWESOME’ ways!

Cheers for now and Happy Dedoosing!