Opening Up Codings?

Abstract

We welcome Tanya Stivers’s discussion (Stivers, 2015/this issue) of coding social interaction and find that her descriptions of the processes of coding open up important avenues for discussion, among other things of the precise ad hoc considerations that researchers need to bear in mind, both when doing formal coding and when doing more “traditional” conversation analysis research based on collections. We are more wary, however, of the implication that coding-based research is the end result of a process that starts with qualitative investigations and ends with categories that can be coded. Instead we propose that the promise of coding-based research lies in its ability to open up new qualitative questions.