Using the Reproducible Open Coding Kit & Epistemic Network Analysis to Model Qualitative Data

Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) is a unified, quantitative – qualitative method aiming to draw from both methodological worlds by leveraging a data set containing raw and quantified qualitative data, as well as metadata about data providers or the data itself. ENA generates network models depicting the relative frequencies of co-occurrences of each unique pair of codes in designated segments of qualitative data. This is a step-by-step tutorial demonstrating how qualitative data can be quantified through coding and segmentation and subsequently modelled with ENA. To prepare data, the Reproducible Open Coding Kit (ROCK) can be employed, a human- and machine-readable standard for representing coded qualitative data, enabling researchers to document their workflow, as well as organize their data and exchange it in a format that is agnostic to software of any kind. ENA allows researchers to obtain insights otherwise unavailable by efficiently presenting relative code frequencies and co-occurrence patterns and facilitating comparison of those patterns, both between groups and for individual data providers.