nmalkin / qcas

Qualitative Coding Assistant for Google Sheets

Qualitative Coding Assistant for Sheets

QCAS (pronounced quokkas) is the Qualitative Coding Assistant for Google Sheets.

What problems does this solve?

Qualitative coding is a process often used in qualitative research, especially with the grounded theory methodology. Basically, it involves a researcher (the coder or rater) looking at individual data items (survey responses, passages, images, etc.) and assigning them labels or categories based on their theme (or another dimension relevant for analysis). To put it even more simply, you look at a bunch of responses and assign labels to each.

Specialized software exists to aid with some variants of this process, but a quick and dirty way this analysis is often done is by having the responses in the column of a spreadsheet, then putting codes in the adjacent column.

This project is a set of Google Apps Scripts that can be added to a Google Sheets spreadsheet to save time when performing these tasks.

Features

Type numbers instead of codes. Instead of typing out the name of the code, you can just type its number (0, 1, 2, …)

Automatically flag conflicting labels. When two coders are labeling responses, conflicts naturally arise. These scripts will create a new column highlighting fields where a conflict occurred, and what exactly that conflict is.

Calculate inter-rater reliability using Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha, or the Kupper & Hafner metric.

Group labels into categories and filter out labels that you decide not to use for calculating agreement.

Installation

Here are the steps to get started using QCAS:

1. Download and unzip the latest package from the releases
2. In the spreadsheet where you want to use QCAS, click on Extensions in the menu bar and select Apps Script. This will open a new window with the Apps Script Project Editor.
3. Copy over Code.gs from the release files
   • In the left pane, click the big + next to Files, and select Script
   • Give the file a name (e.g., Code)
   • Copy and paste the contents of Code.gs into it.
4. Copy over sidebar.html from the release files
   • In the left pane, click the big + next to Files, and select HTML
   • Name the file sidebar
   • Copy and paste the contents of sidebar.html into it.
5. Though it seems intuitive, you do not need to press the big blue "Deploy" button. Instead, move on to Step #6
6. Go back to the tab with your spreadsheet and refresh the page
7. After you've done this, you should see a Coding Assistant menu in your menubar, to the right of the Help menu. Select any of the menu items in that menu
8. The first time you do this, you should see a screen asking you to authorize the app you just created.
   • Despite what the prompt says, the scripts will (and can) only access the current spreadsheet.

Setup

QCAS expects your spreadsheet to be organized a certain way.

To resolve conflicts or calculate IRR

• Codes should be entered in two (or more) adjacent columns
• One row per response
• Codes should start on row 2. (The first row is reserved for the header.)
• If a rater assigned multiple codes to the same response, they should be in one cell, separated by commas (e.g., code_a,code_b)

To take advantage of automatic renaming and categorization

This is a bit more complicated, because you need to set up two sheets: one for the codes (here, all of the above rules still apply) and one for the codebook.

• There needs to be a separate sheet for the codebook, named question-name_codebook with Code and Type column headers.
• The responses will be in a separate sheet, named question-name_codes_coder-name with a Coder column heading.
• If you're flagging conflicts or calculating IRR, the codes need to be pasted into a new sheet, named question-name_codes_final.

Here is a template with additional explanatory comments.

Usage

Coding

To slightly speed up the process of coding, you can take advantage of QCAS's automatic code expansion.

1. Make sure you've set up both the coding and codebook sheets according to the instructions above
2. Select "Show codebook" from the "Coding Assistant" menu. This will open up the sidebar displaying all the codes in your codebook, with a number before each one.
3. In any cell of your coding sheet, type a number and hit Enter. It will be replaced by the associated code from your codebook.
4. To get multiple codes, type the numbers separated by spaces (e.g., 1 2 3). After replacement, the codes will be separated by commas

For more advanced codebook operations (e.g., grouping minor codes into major ones), see further down.

Calculating IRR

1. Select the columns with the codes for which IRR needs to be calculated
2. Go to Coding Assistant > Computer inter-rater reliability and select the appropriate metric

Showing differences between two raters' codes

1. Select the columns with the codes for which differences need to be resolved
2. Go to Coding Assistant > Find conflicts

Type numbers instead of codes

1. Make sure you've set up the different sheets according to the instructions above
2. Make sure your codebook sheet has the codes you will be using
3. Go to Coding Assistant > Show codebook. This will show you the numbers that will be substituted for each code.
4. For a given field, type the number of the code you want to enter. After you press Enter, it should be replaced with the code.
5. If you want to enter multiple codes, you can type numbers separated by spaces, e.g., 1 2 -> code_a,code_b

Code renaming/grouping/categorization

1. Make sure you've set up the different sheets according to the instructions above
2. Make sure your codebook sheet has the codes you will be using and contains the Code - final column
3. To filter out optional codes ("flags"), enter the formula =FILTERFLAGS(RANGE), where RANGE is the range where the codes you want to filter are located in A1 notation (e.g., A1:B100)
4. To replace codes with their new names, enter the formula =FINALNAMES(RANGE), where RANGE is the range where the codes you want to rename are located in A1 notation (e.g., A1:B100)

Building

This project is written in TypeScript and compiled into JavaScript before it's run. You can get the pre-compiled JS from the releases, but if you want to do it yourself:

npm build

qcas's Issues

Pull values for conflict resolution from other sheets

Right now, to do conflict resolution, we copy the code values from different sheets into a single one (assuming the original coding was done in separate sheets, which is the preferred way of doing things.)

It seems that it would be nice to avoid this manual copy/paste step.

Support major codes/groupings

Sometimes we use "minor" codes when coding but later on want to group them into major codes/groupings/categories. We should have some path for supporting these for conflict resolution, etc.