11. Qualitative Data Analysis

11.2. Creating Arguments out of Codes

Victor Tan Chen; Gabriela León-Pérez; Julie Honnold; and Volkan Aytar

Learning Objective

Describe the various approaches you can take to brainstorm new theories and improve on existing theories during the coding process.

Reading the work of celebrated sociologists can be intimidating. How did they conceive of such provocative, nuanced, inspiring, and earth-shaking explanations for how the social world operates? Perhaps we are slightly overstating your personal admiration for sociological theory, but we think you will agree that arriving at compelling theories is a challenging task. The coding process we just described will move you far along this path if you invest sufficient time and effort into it. That said, there are a number of intellectual moves you can take to spark your creativity and guide you to potentially valuable insights.

We’ll discuss three of these strategies: neologisms, typologies, and concept mapping. As you narrow your codes further and further through the open coding process we described earlier, you’ll start to see the limits of existing theories. You’ll encounter phenomena that are distinct from what past theorists have focused on, or are variations on those prior themes, but do not yet have a fitting name. You’ll think of more precise or insightful ways of dissecting and categorizing social reality. And you’ll come up with persuasive new models for the specific processes you’ve observed.

Neologisms

Diagram illustrating the “big bang expansion.”
Neologisms don’t necessarily have to be wholly original ideas you create in a sudden moment of genius. They can tap into the folk theories of your research participants, or they can recast existing theories with wording that is more intuitive and illuminating for others (including lay audiences). A classic example is the “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe. The term was actually coined by a critic of that theory, British astronomer Fred Hoyle. At the time, Hoyle recalled, he was arguing on news programs on behalf of an alternative explanation, the steady-state model: “I was constantly striving over the radio—where I had no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word—for visual images. And that seemed to be one way of distinguishing between the steady-state and the explosive big bang. And so that was the language I used” (Kragh 2013:2.29). NASA/WMAP Science Team, via Wikimedia Commons

One approach to generating new theory is by creating neologisms—new words or expressions, which in a research context would entail finding a precise, illuminating (and hopefully catchy) label for a particular phenomenon. These neologisms are often italicized in books and articles to emphasize that they represent a theorist’s proposed way of understanding an aspect of reality.

Students are often a bit hesitant to put forward their own neologisms. They tend to want to defer to existing theory, stamping everything they see with their favored theorist’s kosher labels. This isn’t how science advances, however. As a critically minded and independent-thinking sociologist, you will want to question whether the prevailing theory—the prevailing term—actually encapsulates the complexity of social life in an accurate and thoughtful way. Don’t be afraid to weigh into these debates, even if you are a novice researcher.

Now, it is very true that neologisms can be overdone. As you read through the literature on any topic, you’ll inevitably find yourself spotting a writer’s italicized term and rolling your eyes. It may come across as awkward to you. Or you may feel existing terms cover the same ground more than adequately. When creating a neologism, you should keep these concerns in mind. For the first problem, the phrasing of the term, you might want to imagine yourself referencing the term in another writing context. Does it roll easily off the tongue? Does it need an explanation attached every time you use it, or can it potentially stand alone (the latter obviously being better)? Does it come across as gimmicky—a transparent attempt to exploit an issue briefly in the news, to be oh-so-cute in your self-important jargon, or to add hipness to the field (always a tragic endeavor)?

You should also ask yourself whether the literature really needs a new term for this phenomenon. Review any existing terms, comparing and contrasting them to your own and seeing if your new take adds something to the conversation. The answer will often depend on whether you’ve successfully uncovered a wrinkle in the existing theory—some aspect of the phenomenon that hasn’t been sufficiently examined, and that therefore calls for a new label. One way to spot these shortcomings in current terminology is to diligently code the various dimensions of the topics or themes you observe in the ways we described earlier, which can flag specific areas the literature has neglected.

You should also note that you don’t need to think up entirely new terms to advance the literature in your field. You can also contribute just by identifying elegant and instructive new ways to rework existing labels. A catchier neologism may replace the staid term currently being used. More important, if your new wording includes a vivid and accessible metaphor, it can help more people grasp the underlying idea. A classic (if somewhat contentious) example is the big bang theory, the now well-established view among physicists that the universe began in a state of unimaginably high density and temperature and then expanded outward. The Belgian priest and theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître proposed the idea of a universe spreading out from a single point, which he called the “primeval atom” (Soter and Tyson 2001). It was actually a critic of this theory, British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “big bang.” (Hoyle favored an alternative explanation for the universe’s origins, the so-called steady-state model.) The “big bang theory” spread like wildfire within the scientific community and then the public at large—to the point of having a middling television show named after it. And you can see why: as Hoyle himself pointed out, the words “big bang” provided a ready visual image that made it easy for even lay audiences to get the gist of the theory. Nevertheless, scientists continue to gripe that the words “big bang” inaccurately imply that the universe’s origins involved an explosion in space (rather than an expansion of space), and that sound somehow travels in space (Kragh 2013; Mathew 2013). For better or worse, the term has stuck.

Still from the movie Mean Girls of Gretchen Wieners saying, “That is so fetch!”
When you’re considering a neologism, ask yourself if the new term improves on what is currently used in the literature—by capturing some aspects of the phenomenon of interest more fully, or by helping people understand a complex idea in a comfortable, even catchy way. If not, you should heed the sage advice of Regina George from Mean Girls: stop trying to make “fetch” happen. It’s not going to happen. Paramount, via Fandom

Another alternative to thinking up whole new terms out of thin air is to borrow the terminology used by your research participants. As part of the aforementioned “folk theories” they cultivate, cultures and subcultures have unique ways of naming practices, beliefs, and other phenomena relevant to their members. You can advance existing theories just by bringing to light these examples of insider knowledge. Through the process of open coding, such terms will naturally stand out, and you should keep an eye out for how they might help explain what goes on in the settings you observe.

One danger of this approach, however, is that you may naively adopt the perspective of your participants, who—as with any group—have particular moral and political outlooks that can blind them to other ways of looking at the world. They may not actually do what they say (or what their terms imply), and they may buy into dominant ideologies that could bias the way you interpret their actions. An example of both the strengths and potential pitfalls of adopting folk terms from your participants is the “street” and “decent” terminology that ethnographer Elijah Anderson put forward in his book Code of the Street (2000). In the Philadelphia neighborhoods that Anderson studied, “street” was regularly used as a label for people more or less involved in criminal activities, whereas “decent” described upstanding citizens who stayed off the gang corners. These terms provided a powerful way of understanding how neighborhood residents navigated their social world. At the same time, they also garnered criticism for uncritically accepting moralistic and simplistic folk categories that “decent” folks appeared to be imposing on an unseemly “street” element—a charge that Anderson vehemently denied (Anderson 2002; Wacquant 2002).

Typologies

Video 11.1. A Typology of Parenting Approaches. In this video, Annette Lareau (2011) discusses the typology she created to describe the parenting strategies that she observed among middle-class and working-class households.

As you break down the various dimensions of a concept in the open coding process, you will find yourself creating typologies—classification systems with distinct categories that capture different varieties of a given phenomenon. You can contribute to the scientific understanding of your topic in important ways by either devising a new way of typologizing a phenomenon or revising an existing typology to account for something it missed. A good typology helps us make sense of how a phenomenon varies and what factors might contribute to that variation. We’ve already mentioned one simple typology—Elijah Anderson’s “street” and “decent” dichotomy—which categorized neighborhood residents according to their relationship with illicit activity, and which was drawn from the folk language of the culture Anderson observed. According to Anderson, the two groups could be distinguished by whether they upheld middle-class values (“decent”) or defied them (“street”), conformed to or deviated from social norms, had traditional or nontraditional family structures, and lived private versus public lives. You could imagine how these various moral and cultural dimensions of “street” and “decent” life may have originated from descriptive codes created during the open coding process, which his analysis could have knitted together as dimensions of a broader cultural orientation toward the neighborhood and its criminal activity.

Another classic example of a simple but provocative typology is Annette Lareau’s categorization of parenting strategies in her ethnography Unequal Childhoods (2011). Based on the observations that she and her colleagues conducted in households with children, Lareau argued that middle-class parents engaged in more intensive parenting—what she called “concerted cultivation.” Like a gardener working with a delicate flower, they invested large amounts of time and effort into personally nurturing their children’s academic and social skills. For instance, these more affluent and educated parents would fill children’s schedules with enrichment activities, regularly engage in intellectually challenging, adult-like conversations with them, and model for them how to interact assertively with the authority figures in their lives. In contrast, working-class and poor parents pursued a strategy that Lareau called the “accomplishment of natural growth.” These parents did not love their children any less, Lareau pointed out, but they believed—based on their own upbringing and culture—that it was better to let children roam free, without a parent stepping in to instruct them or intervene on their behalf.

The two parenting styles are summarized in Table 11.1. Let’s consider how a typology like the one in the table might emerge during the coding process. Perhaps you might start this analysis with broad descriptive codes like “language use” and “intervention in institutions.” Breaking down the wide variation in these observed activities could lead you to develop arguments about how parents of different social classes behave in different ways within these areas. Moving in the opposite analytical direction, you could also merge these codes. Recognizing variations across specific dimensions of parenting could prompt you to see them all as part of a larger class divide of more active and passive engagement with children. (We’re only guessing at the analytical process that Lareau undertook, but you can listen to her describe for herself the parenting typology she developed in Video 11.1.)

Typologies can describe dimensions of any particular phenomenon—a range of diverse explanations, consequences, processes, and so on. It helps when typologies draw from an evocative and accessible metaphor, like the gardening imagery that Lareau used in her terms. You should also note that the categories in a typology typically represent ideal types—varieties of a phenomenon with particular characteristics imagined in their purest form. Using ideal types keeps a theory simple and streamlined. The real-world cases you observe may not fit perfectly within a single bucket, and some may span multiple ones. This is fine. In fact, it can inspire you to think of the reasons that certain cases straddle categories.

Another thing to keep in mind when constructing typologies is whether the concepts you’re describing are being treated as independent variables or dependent variables. Are you trying to explain why the variation across dimensions is occurring, or do you want to understand the consequences of that variation? Oftentimes, the categories of your typology can be plausibly viewed as both causes and consequences, but for the sake of generating new theories, it can be helpful to be explicit about the orientation here you’re taking.

Table 11.1. Typology of Parenting Approaches in Lareau (2011)

Concerted Cultivation

Accomplishment of Natural Growth

Organization of Daily Life

Parents schedule numerous activities to occupy their children’s time outside of school.

Parents provide children with large amounts of unstructured time.

Language Use

Parents negotiate with children at length and tolerate challenges to their decisions.

Parents do not allow for questioning of their directives.

Intervention in Institutions

Parents get involved to improve outcomes overseen by these institutions and also teach their children how to navigate such spaces.

Parents defer to authority figures and endure the consequences of disconnects between their views and those of the institution.

Overall Approach and Consequences

Parents are actively engaged in the enrichment of their children, who develop a sense of entitlement about the treatment they deserve.

Children develop their interests and talents relatively independently, often encountering constraints as a result the lack of adult support.

Note: Adapted from “Typology of Differences in Child Rearing” in Lareau (2011, table 1).

Obviously, you don’t have to limit yourself to the sorts of binary or dichotomous typologies we’ve been discussing so far. You can easily identify three or more categories of a given phenomenon during your coding process (but note that adding more and more categories can clutter your theory and make it less easy to apply to other contexts). Furthermore, you can use two-by-two tables of the sort depicted in Figure 11.9. In this analytical approach, you tease out how variation across two dimensions leads to distinct outcomes. This can help you understand how the categories you identified for your typology relate to one another.

In this example, Victor and his collaborators mapped out a typology of entrepreneurship based on the degree of creative independence (the extent to which entrepreneurs could conduct their work activities as they pleased) and the degree of financial independence (the extent to which they were obligated to financial backers) that people who started their own businesses enjoyed (Doody, Chen, and Goldstein 2016). More or less autonomy in these areas could situate an entrepreneur in one of the four categories described in the two-by-two table: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur (e.g., a tech startup founder reliant on venture capital funding), a Main Street entrepreneur (e.g., the owner of a mom-and-pop business that sustains itself on its own income), a corporate entrepreneur (e.g., an individual in a large company incentivized to create and manage new ventures), and a self-employed entrepreneur (e.g., an Uber driver or other gig worker constrained by the rules and oversight of a platform).

Two-by-two table illustrating how variations in financial independence and creative independence correspond with different types of entrepreneurs.
Figure 11.9. Two-by-Two Table. In this two-by-two table from an article in Sociology Compass (Doody et al. 2016, figure 1), the authors present a typology of entrepreneurship. Two-by-two tables can illustrate in an accessible way how variation across two measures (here, financial independence across the rows, and creative independence across the columns) map onto different categories of a particular phenomenon (here, types of entrepreneurs). Wiley

With a two-by-two table, you are explicitly contrasting the groupings you observe in your data according to how their characteristics in the two highlighted areas compare. You can imagine how such a comparative approach could naturally evolve from the process of coding similarities and differences across your cases and explaining why cases fall into particular groups (possibly ones that your participants have already identified as being important in their folk theories). Again, you can go beyond the simple categorization scheme in this example—having three or more rows or columns in your table, or locating groups somewhere on a continuum rather than discrete boxes—but this adds complexity that may make your theory unwieldy.

Diagram depicting meritocratic morality, fraternal morality, egalitarian morality, and the morality of grace.
Figure 11.10. Complex Typologies. Beyond simple typologies and two-by-two tables, you can think of more complex categorization schemes that get at the relationships between different concepts or different dimensions of a single concept. For example, this typology from Victor’s work compares and contrasts different moral perspectives (Chen 2015, 2021). Note that greater complexity, however, can overly complicate theories, which ideally are sufficiently lean and simple (parsimonious, to use the technical term) that they can be applied widely and easily.

If you want to get really convoluted, you can propose typologies of the sort described in Figure 11.10, which includes four moral perspectives and compares them across several dimensions. One thing to note about this approach is the importance of a clear visual representation of your theory. This goes for distinguishing between categories or dimensions within a typology as well as for presenting theorized relationships between concepts, which we will discuss next.

Concept Maps

Concept map connecting community heterogeneity (independent variable) with various measures of trust (dependent variables).
Figure 11.11. Concept Maps. Created for a literature review that Victor conducted, this concept map details the relationships being evaluated in a paper by the political scientists Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaeffer, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov (2020). Their meta-analysis incorporated the findings of 87 studies to determine whether the ethnic diversity of neighborhoods erodes reported levels of trust between individuals. This concept map summarizes the patterns of findings across the analyzed studies. Plus and minus signs refer to positive and negative relationships, and “ns” means that the relationship was not statistically significant (a concept discussed in Chapter 14: Quantitative Data Analysis).

In previous chapters, we’ve described how important concept mapping is to understanding existing theories and the relationships you plan to explore with your empirical research. Now we want to talk about how concept mapping can help you create or refine theories at the data analysis stage.

Concept mapping involves visualizing concepts and the relationships between them, generally using boxes and arrows (with the direction of the arrows showing the presumed direction of causality). You can lay out these concepts and relationships in a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs or in a presentation program like Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides, which have simple-to-use tools for drawing and linking boxes and arrows. (You can also just start off with a piece of paper or a whiteboard.)

There are several ways to profitably use concept maps to create or improve upon theories. In storylining, for instance, you take the categories and relationships depicted in your concept map and use them to tell a causal story about the observed phenomenon. If sufficiently plausible, this story can be the central to your study’s findings. (As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, you should do your due diligence in elaborating on any alternative explanations and not overstating the degree of certainty in this theory that your data justifies.)

You might also find it useful to compare the concept maps that emerge from your coding with any concept maps you generated for previous studies (see the example in Figure 11.11). What does your study include in its concept map that other studies do not? This difference becomes the basis for theoretical innovation. (You might even want to embark on this process of comparative concept mapping during the early literature review stage of your research, which we discussed in Chapter 5: Research Design.) If your concept map is exactly the same as that for another study, your study may still be contributing in a substantial way because of the specific methods it uses or the specific sample it has gathered. Visualizing your research in this way can help you pinpoint its contribution.

Key Takeaways

  1. Neologisms may come to mind as you pour through your data and identify theoretical curiosities or empirical patterns in your participants’ behavior and thought. They can advance the literature by providing a new way of defining and labeling an aspect of social reality or a more precise and intuitive way of characterizing existing theories.
  2. Typologies help us understand the different dimensions of a given phenomenon. They can arise organically from the process of breaking down a concept or connecting different concepts during the coding process.
  3. As you piece together a causal process through your coding, creating a concept map can help you see how the pieces fit together and understand what new features of the process your own work is uncovering or illuminating.
definition

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

11.2. Creating Arguments out of Codes Copyright © by Victor Tan Chen; Gabriela León-Pérez; Julie Honnold; and Volkan Aytar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book