Practice with these exercises to prepare for your seminars and wider research.

1. Examine one of interview transcript of the interview with Joanna:
(a) Consider what themes you can find in this transcript and use these to make a list of codes for the passage. Mark your transcript with code words that describe the themes on the margin.
(b) Consider what assumptions you have made. What have you found difficult?
(c) Are your codes objective? What decisions have you taken in choosing particular codes to characterise particular words or phrases in particular ways? How do you account for similarities and differences in coding between other people in your group who have coded the extract? What has been left out? Can the use of such codes give us agreed interpretations of these data? If codes are not agreed, does this matter?
(d) Report back to the rest of the workshop. Can transcripts of this sort be used as a basis for generalising about diabetes review consultations or the relationship between nurses and patients?
(e) If you are using a computer programme for analysing qualitative data, such as NVivo, you may find it helpful to enter the data and your codes and use the computer to search for coded segments, or segments where codes overlap.

2. Apply the codes you developed in the last exercise to the interviews with Cindy, Maureen and Lauren, all of whom were interviewed for the same research project as Joanna. Do the codes fit these new interviews? Do any need to be modified? Do any new codes appear to be needed?