Verbatim Coding For Open Ends
Being top of mind is so important for a brand, and assessing whether that is happening can provide invaluable insights. Open-ended questions are a great tool to understand the thoughts of your audience. Once you have those questions answered in a survey, what’s next? How do I look at the information for its qualitative and quantitative value? That’s where verbatim coding comes in!
“There are a couple of benefits to coding verbatim,” said Kalil Vicioso, board member at Insights in Color and principal at Tiny Hat Consulting. “First. It adds a layer of rigor to your analysis. Are you really hearing a pattern? Can you point to instances of an insight theme? Second. It allows you to nuance the themes you find. You’ve established there’s a theme. What are the dimensions of that theme? Variations on that theme? This allows you to see if a theme is true across audiences and if maybe the theme holds but diferent audiences lean into different variations. Third. It is a critical step in content analysis which is the first step in taking qual to quant.”
Verbatim Coding Open-Ended Surveys
Open-ended questions, where the respondent answers in their own words, offer an aspect of understanding of attitudes, feelings and preferences for a product or service. With an infinite range of answers, a wealth of data may be collected, including unexpected revelations about your brand!
Still, allowing individuals to provide freestyle answers creates a lengthy and time consuming analysis process. Answers may be difficult to compare, and may yield significant unsolicited information. Just consider all the various options to field surveys: Telephone interviews, web surveys, in-person interviews, mobile device surveys, etc. Interpreting all this data into quantitative statistics can be daunting. Coding these responses is the support required to research professionals who are looking for insights.
Read next: How Transcription in Research Can Benefit Your Research Project
Verbatim Coding: The Process, In A Nutshell
A professional coding service captures the key points of the verbatim collected, to turn your qualitative findings into quantitative data.
Professionally created codebooks from experienced researchers supply the most supportive roots to summarize the results of the open ends effectively. Care must be taken to ensure coverage of responses, avoid commonality, and create contrast. The ultimate goal is the right number of data points to make analysis useful. Consistency and accuracy, while avoiding bias, are the keystones in successful human manual coding.
Reviewing all responses and properly designating them to the right code allows for quantitative support for your qualitative questions. The research team can pick exact quotes to share with the client and provide percentages of those who have a similar or opposing view.
Getting started
Our diligent US-based coding team has years of experience with consumer, business, technology, and medical coding, providing insightful and detail-oriented survey analysis you can only get from manually coding verbatim. We take it a step further than most survey coding companies by providing superior customer service and quality assurance from our in-house QA team, along with the verbatim analysis. Your dedicated project manager is with you every step of the way.
Focus Forward Coding is your premier source for open-ended coding. Let’s talk today about your project.
