I think that overall I did get better at coding this time. Practice makes perfect, right? I have just been trying to really dig into what the utterances are saying and make my codes as specific as possible. Probably still have a ways to go, but I think the practice and feedback is what mainly helped me get better. Also I think getting all of the class on the same page helped a lot more, too. I know a few weeks ago many students were certain that we were supposed to be doing high inference, while others were certain we were supposed to be doing low inference. One even seemed to have skipped coding altogether and was assembling a theory straight from the utterances. But once we were able to all be on the same page for low inference coding, that made things move a lot faster.

So what I took from the feedback was the need to expand the codes to make sense to others. In my head I know I was making low inference codes, but then reducing them to put on the spreadsheet. This made the codes longer, with some being considerably longer than the original utterance. But that is okay I now know. I think my problem now is that I am missing older codes that could fit the newer utterances as I go along. In the small groups this week, Alana and Heather pointed out how some of the utterances near the bottom of the page could fit into the codes from the earlier utterances. I realized I had been so deep into being descriptive that I was just giving everything its own code and not making connections (where needed) with earlier codes. So in the future I need to keep in mind existing codes as well.