Coding module



Coding module

Often we may ask respondents open ended questions, where we in reality wish to report on the given answers using closed type questions (single or multi). A typical example would be an open question like “Please name all the car brands you can think of:”. An alternative to such an open question would be a multi question asking the users to specify on a long list of named car brands, which ones he or she knows. The results would most likely be very different, although the question in reality is the same. When we use open questions we are more interested in which brands immediately come to mind when a user thinks of cars, whereas a closed question really just wants the full list of brands a user knows. Now, even if we ask the user about his knowledge based on an open question, we will still want to make a report on e.g. “The first brand that users thought of” and “The full list of brands that users thought of”. This we can although not do unless we convert the open answers into a number of closed answers. This we can do using the coding module of Catglobe.

Before we start introducing the coding module we need to get some terminologies defined. First of all we call the process of converting open answers to closed answers as coding. We in reality see two main actors when handling coding, namely the coding manager and the coder. The first mentioned specifies the “jobs” that need coding whereas the latter does the actual conversion. The assignment of a number of questions that need to be converted we call a “coding job”, whereas each individual conversion in that job (each identified open question) we call a coding task.

The specification of who are coding managers and who are coders is done through the access the users have to the coding job. Since a coding job is a resource, we use the typical resource access dialogues to state these roles. Basically we see coders as users who have minimum Observer access to a coding job and Coding Managers as users who have minimum Manager access to a coding job. In other words, if a user is a Coding Manager he will also always be able to code that coding job. Coding jobs are always related to questionnaires and can be found under the questionnaire dialogues “coding jobs” tab. Since coding jobs are child resources to the questionnaire, any users who have access to the questionnaire will as minimum have the same access to the coding jobs.

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