Coding Queries

Okay, now let’s move on. Close any query results tabs that you have open.
The next few queries I am going to show you are better to use when you have done some coding, as they can help you gain insight from all your work coding your content. For example, you could use these to find potential connections between codes, or connections between a code and a certain demographic.
Let’s start with Coding queries. You can use these to find all content coded at selected codes, a combination of codes, or a combination of codes and attributes. So for example, let’s say you want to see if there is content coded as both “Memorable quotes” and “Real estate development,” and you only want to see references that are from residents of Marshallberg – you can do this with a Coding query. Go to the Explore menu, and from the Query drop-down menu, select Coding.
We can keep the defaults for now, which only finds references that are coded with all the codes listed. So, we just need to click on the arrow next to no selected codes to select the two codes we want: “Memorable quotes” and “Real estate development.” Put checkmarks next to both of these codes, and then click on Select.
Then click on Run Query to see the results.
You are shown all the results, but you can also click on the Summary tab just above the results to see how many results you got. We can see there are a few results in interviews and survey responses.
But we can narrow this down further, to just quotes from residents of Marshallberg. To do that, we can click on the plus sign at the top right to add another parameter to our search.
For this new row, we use the drop-down menu to select Any case where.
Next click on the arrow next to no selected attribute.
Then expand Person, select Township, and click Select Attribute.
From the far blank right drop-down, select “Marshallberg.” So the query says “All” at the top left, meaning all of these conditions must be true. Then one line says that the content must be coded with both of the codes, Memorable quotes and Real estate development, and then the other line says AND the person who said this must be from Marshallberg.
Click on Run Query again. This time you can see we get just one large memorable quote on real estate from Mary and James, who are from Marshallberg. (Click on the Reference tab to read it.)
We might not want to save the results, but we might want to save this query to re-run again in the future as we continue to code. To do that, click on Save Criteria… at the top right.
Give it the name “Marshallberg Quotes on Real Estate” and click on Save Criteria. Then close the query results tab using the View menu.
This query is now saved in the Query Criteria section on the left, under Queries. You can double click on it at any time to re-open the settings for the query, where you can then re-run it.

Test Your Understanding 2

Run a Coding query for the project to find interview content only coded as “Infrastructure,” “Policy, management,” OR “Real estate development” where the interviewees are from Harkers Island. How many references did you find?

(Hint: You will have to change an option to say Any instead of All to satisfy the “or” condition, different than in the demonstration.)

Click here for the answers.

Technique: Qualitative Data Analysis | Tools: NVivo