S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

157

laughter. Very rarely were amendments made, and if so, these errors had resulted from intermittent poor and compromised volume for the transcriber. If the interview was by telephone then the recording ceased when the telephone call ended. Usually within 48 hours after the teleconference the researcher received a ‘mpg’ audio file as an attachment to an email from the teleconference convener. The researcher undertook the same process as with the digital recordings, to obtain a written transcription. Again the researcher checked the accuracy of the written transcript against the ‘mpg’ audio file and made amendments if necessary. 5.9.2 Coding Coding is fundamental to qualitative data analysis. ‘Coding is a process of identifying aspects of the data that relate to the research question’ (Braun et al., 2013, p. 206) or as Saldana (2009) states, codes are a word or short phrase which symbolically ‘assigns a summative, salient, essence capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language based … data’ (p. 3). The researcher kept in mind that it was not the words themselves but their meaning that mattered (Miles & Huberman, 1994). During this initial phase the researcher was mindful that when deciphering passages to discover their core meaning— decoding— having determined its appropriate code, the text was then labelled— encoding (Saldana, 2009). To ensure that the context of codes were not lost (Bryman, 2001) coding of the data was undertaken inclusively, meaning keeping small amounts of surrounding data if relevant (Braun & Clarke, 2006). During this stage the researcher was mindful that coding is merely a transitional step in the process of moving from data collection to that of analysis; a process which is transitional and an organisational (of the collected qualitative data).