Abductive Coding: Theory Building and Qualitative (Re)Analysis

Abstract

Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set of tactics for abductive analysis that can be applied for qualitative analysis. Our approach applies Timmermans and Tavory's ( Timmermans and Tavory 2012 ; Tavory and Timmermans 2014 ) three stages of abduction in three steps for qualitative (secondary) analysis: Generating an Abductive Codebook, Abductive Data Reduction through Code Equations, and In-Depth Abductive Qualitative Analysis. A key contribution of our article is the development of “code equations”—defined as the combination of codes to operationalize phenomena that span individual codes. Code equations are an important resource for abduction and other qualitative approaches that leverage qualitative data to build theory.

Citizens’ experiences of a policy-ridden environment: A methodological contribution to feedback studies based on qualitative secondary analysis

“…We also elaborate on a coding strategy to operationalize participants' policy experiences and perceptions in interview data, both individual and focus-groups, with no policy prompts. Our coding is abductive (Vila-Henninger et al, 2022). Second, to tackle the inferential issue raised by the study of citizens' multiple policy experiences with policy-specific mechanisms, we elaborate on the empirical study of a normative mechanism (Svallfors, 2010) that captures how multiple policy experiences and perceptions may co-construct collective norms.…”

“…This approach is also key to the process of (re)contextualization of data that we analysed. The development of qualitative secondary analysis has generated large debates on the new research possibilities it may offer (Davidson et al, 2019; Duchesne, 2017; Hughes et al, 2021; Hughes et al, 2022; Vila-Henninger et al, 2022) and this article intends to foster them from the perspective of feedback studies.…”

“…We turned to qualitative secondary data based on a constructed corpus of qualitative datasets (for a synthetic presentation of the related debates, including epistemological discussions, see Vila-Henninger et al, 2022; Duchesne, 2017; Hughes and Tarrant, 2020). Secondary analysis is understood as “a research strategy which makes use of pre-existing quantitative or pre-existing qualitative research data to investigate new questions or verify previous studies” (Heaton, 2004: 16).…”

“…We thus needed to elaborate on coding criteria to exclusively code for policy experiences and perceptions. They emerged during an abductive process of collective coding that we describe elsewhere (Vila-Henninger et al, 2022). Our coding strategy was iterative in essence.…”

“…Legitimation is a social process that draws upon widely held beliefs, norms, and values (Weber, 1978; Thompson, 1971), and this is why we approach norms as they are relied on as legitimation or delegitimation by interviewees during political discussions. Concretely, these interview segments are empirically identified by combining our policy codes – that we presented in the previous section, and our neoliberalism codes (on the definition and use of code equations in qualitative research, see Vila-Henninger et al, 2022). Building on the literature (Rougier, 1938; Amable, 2011; Foucault, 2008; Harvey, 2005), our codebook for neoliberal ideology 11 isolated four major elements of neoliberal ideology: fair market competition, market individualism, market liberty, and human capital.…”