Developing qualitative coding frameworks for educational research: immigration, education and the Children Crossing Borders project

Abstract

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi‐sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it searchable, and thus comparable, so that we could understand more deeply the perspectives and desires of immigrant parents and preschool teachers on education. This article uses examples from the CCB project to show how coding frameworks can be created to support large‐scale collaborative projects that seek to amplify the voices of marginalized groups in educational qualitative research. We argue here that creating qualitative coding frameworks depends on a balance between etic/insider and emic/outsider knowledge, decisions about interpretation and practical compromises about labels and meanings. These three elements play out in necessary debates and disagreements as part of the creative process and are critical for large‐scale projects looking for a coding framework and a coding process that is both useful and meaningful.