This is the ninth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5001: Ethnography and Participant Observation.

Indexes to the corpus of texts (fieldnotes, tapes, transcripts, materials directly produced by informants, etc.) are essential. They are best developed as the field work proceeds and before the corpus is too large.

Note that what I call "indexing" other call "coding" or "categorizing."  In some instances the words can be taken to be mostly synonymous.  Each however carry a possibly quite different theoretical load that should be clarified:

  1. an index entry is designed to help an analyst retrieve data from his corpus.  It is pre-theoretical in the sense that it is not designed to be used by anyone but this particular analyst.  It is not intended to be used by anyone else, and, above all, it is not intended to be made public (and thus justified, defended, etc.).
  2. a category properly refers to a particular approach to ethnography or qualitative research associated with what Glaser and Strauss called "grounded theory."  At the end of the research the "category" can be treated as a variable to be correlated with variation in the value of other such categories.
  3. a code properly refers to way of organizing observations based on an pre-observational (deductive) understanding of the phenomenon under study (or perhaps the result of an earlier ethnographic research that "grounded" the decision to focus on the particular behavior).  Coding belongs to the world of experimental research with the serious attendant issues of intercoder reliability. 

Categorizing and coding are not inherent part of ethnography: many ethnographers never categorize or code. But all, in one way or another index what they collect.  Indeed anyone working with fieldnotes and other material collected through participant-observation, interviewing, video, etc., must start with an index designed for retrieval.

Several companies sell programs that are supposed to make the indexing process easier. Some students I know have used one of these programs with some success.

It is also possible to use list programs in WordPerfect or Word to achieve some of the functionality of these programs. It might also be possible to use HTML as I am doing as an experiment in these pages.

Each of these have been found useful by some students I know. They are all controversial as it is evident in a recent conversation (September 2003) among some of the top ethnographers of education. In this conversation many fundamental points are made about coding, premature closure and other essential issues.

As mentioned in my own contribution to this discussion, indexing one's corpus--however minimally--must occur. This does remain a task that must, theoretically, be done pre-theoretically.

Two indexes are minimally necessary:

An example from my fieldwork in Ireland.

An exercise from my fieldwork in Ireland: how would you index these pictures?