Louvain-la-Neuve
Bat Leclercq -LECL B290
Abductive coding for qualitative analysis: From fundamental research to methodological and social innovations
Prof. Claire Dupuy (ISPOLE, UCLouvain), Prof. Virginie Van Ingelgom (F.R.S-FNRS, ISPOLE, UCLouvain), in collaboration with Dr. Luis Vila-Henninger (EvalCorp, US)
Building on the methodological approach to abductive coding developed in the context of ERC Qualidem project (Vila-Henninger, Dupuy, Van Ingelgom et al., 2022), Dupuy and Van Ingelgom will present their newest project: an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant, the DACAT project, that aims at providing a toolkit for abductive coding – the Abductive Coding Analysis Toolkit (ACAToolkit). As a background to the discussion, they will introduce the QUALIDEM co-authored article entitled ‘Abductive Coding: Theory Building and Qualitative (Re)Analysis’
published in 2022 in Sociological Methods & Research.
In qualitative data analysis oriented towards theory-building, many data analysts anchor their methodological approach – explicitly or not – in grounded theory. However, as research in teams develops, handling larger amounts of qualitative data enabled by technological developments, grounded theory’s principles are increasingly at odds with current practices; and analysts of qualitative data are left relying on coding procedures that do not match their realities. Following a burgeoning literature and building on the ERC-funded QUALIDEM project, they argue that shifting to an abductive approach of coding, that combines deduction and induction at different stages of data analysis, provides an epistemology to qualitative research that aims at theory-building. More specifically, the ERC PoC DACAT aims to develop abduction as a method of qualitative data analysis by providing a toolkit for abductive coding – the Abductive Coding Analysis Toolkit (ACAToolkit). The ACAToolkit includes three main components: (1) a practical guide ; (2) an educational program for training; (3) an overview of the potentials and limits of existing QDA software - for abductive coding. It will be tested with different potential end-users during five in situ tests – with researchers (Prof. M. Theiss, University of Warsaw), students and educators (MethodsNet), software developers (Delve), and data analysts (EvalCorp). The toolkit aims to be free, attractive, widely applicable, and with a wide disciplinary range.
