RES 724 Week 6 Coding and Analysis Example

From Transcript to Themes: Coding and Analyzing Successors' Accounts With IPA

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

RES/724: Qualitative Methods and Design

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner, the firms, the successors, the transcript excerpts and the planned study are composites written for a model paper.

Weeks 1 to 5 planned the composite Des Moines banker's interpretative phenomenological analysis. Before recruiting, she conducted three pilot interviews with successors in Nebraska and Missouri who meet every criterion except location, none of them clients of her bank, and who agreed that their data could be used for practice only. This paper uses those transcripts to work through IPA analysis.

IPA's Analytic Steps

Smith et al. (2009) set out a flexible sequence for IPA analysis: reading and rereading a transcript to become immersed; initial noting, with exploratory comments on descriptive content, language use and conceptual meaning; developing emergent themes, more recently called experiential statements, that capture the meaning of short sections; searching for connections among those statements to form a case's themes; moving to the next case while bracketing the first; and looking for patterns across cases. Each case is analyzed in full before the next, reflecting IPA's idiographic commitment.

A Transcript Excerpt

From the first pilot successor, called Dana, who leads a trailer manufacturer founded by her father:

"The first month, I'd walk out on the floor and they'd stop talking. Not because they didn't like me. They've known me since I was six. It's that they didn't know what I was yet. Was I Dana, or was I the boss? And honestly, I didn't know either. Dad would come in at seven like always, and I'd see guys go to his office with questions. I'd be sitting in my office, which is really his old office, and I'd hear them laughing in there."

Exploratory Comments

Descriptive comments: employees stop talking when she walks on the floor; known her since childhood; father arrives at seven; employees take questions to him; she sits in his former office.

Linguistic comments: "what I was yet," not who, suggesting a role not yet formed; the question "Dana, or the boss?" sets personal identity against role; "really his old office" signals she does not feel the office is hers; laughter heard through a wall, from outside.

Conceptual comments: an identity in transition, for her and for employees; authority located in the father's person and routines; a sense of occupying a space that still belongs to someone else; exclusion from the informal life of the plant.

First-Cycle Codes

Saldaña (2016) describes many first-cycle coding methods and advises choosing those that suit the research questions and tradition. Two fit IPA's focus on experience. In vivo codes use the participant's words: "what I was yet," "his old office." Emotion codes capture feelings named or implied: uncertainty, exclusion. The banker applies both alongside exploratory comments, not as a substitute for them.

Experiential Statements

From the comments, the banker wrote experiential statements that condense meaning while staying close to Dana's words:

Becoming the boss is a question of what she is, not only what she does.

Authority still lives in her father's routine and presence.

She occupies a space that is not yet hers.

Being known since childhood complicates being followed.

Dana's Personal Experiential Themes

Across her full transcript, 46 experiential statements clustered into four personal themes:

Leading from a borrowed office: her sense that the role, space and authority were her father's.

Earning the floor: her efforts to gain employees' trust through presence and competence on the shop floor.

Two Danas: the tension between the daughter employees knew and the leader she was becoming.

Guarding the name: her sense of responsibility not to be the generation that lost the business.

Dana did not describe a conflict with her father; she described sitting in his office and hearing laughter through the wall.

Comparing Cases

After analyzing each of the three pilot cases separately, the banker compared them using a matrix display, following Miles et al. (2014), who recommend matrices with cases as rows and themes as columns to make patterns and differences across cases visible. Tentative group themes:

Leading from a borrowed office: present in all three cases, in different forms. One successor had moved the founder to a new office; another described the founder's truck in the parking lot as a signal to employees.

Earning the floor: present in two cases. The third successor, who had worked on the floor for ten years before taking over, described the opposite: needing to step back from the floor to lead.

Guarding the name: present in all three.

The divergent case is kept visible, since it suggests that a successor's prior role in the firm shapes the experience of taking over.

Writing Theme Labels

Theme labels went through several versions. "Authority issues" became "Authority still lives with Dad" and then "Leading from a borrowed office," a phrase that captures Dana's spatial image and her sense of the role. The banker tested each label against two questions: would a successor recognize the experience in it, and does it say something rather than name a topic? "Employee relationships" failed both and was replaced by "Earning the floor," which describes what successors do and feel.

The Double Hermeneutic in Practice

IPA describes the researcher as making sense of participants making sense of their experience. In Dana's case, Dana interprets the silence on the floor as employees not knowing "what I was yet." The banker's interpretation goes further, reading the silence alongside the borrowed office as a sign that the role itself was still being negotiated. Both readings are reported, with the banker's marked as interpretation and grounded in Dana's words.

Memos

The banker writes a memo after each analytic session. One reads: "Borrowed office appears in all three, but only Dana uses the word 'borrowed.' Am I importing her phrase into the others? Check whether 'borrowed' fits or whether the others describe something closer to 'shared.'" Memos like this record doubts, alternative readings and decisions.

Software and Audit Trail

Transcripts, comments and codes are organized in qualitative analysis software, which stores links between excerpts and themes. The software does not identify themes; the banker does, by reading and rereading. An analytic log records each step: dates, transcripts analyzed, changes to theme labels and reasons. Together with memos, it forms the audit trail described in Week 7.

Checks on the Analysis

A fellow doctoral student coded Dana's full transcript independently during one long session. The two compared experiential statements, not to reach agreement scores, which IPA does not seek, but to see whether the banker had missed or overstated anything. The colleague noticed humor in Dana's account that the banker had not commented on, which led to a memo on how successors use humor to manage awkward moments with employees.

Conclusion

IPA's steps, applied to a pilot excerpt, turned Dana's words into exploratory comments, experiential statements and four personal themes, and comparison across three cases produced tentative group themes with a divergent case kept in view. Memos, software, an analytic log and a colleague's reading make the analysis traceable. Week 7 turns to trustworthiness.

References

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.

Saldaña, J. (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Sage.

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. Sage.