Definition
Qualitative Document Coding is a research method in which multiple trained coders systematically label passages of text — such as policy documents, syllabi, or transcripts — with categories drawn from a codebook, in order to surface recurring themes and patterns. Using several independent coders and checking their agreement guards against any one reader’s bias, lending the resulting themes more credibility than a single researcher’s impressions. It is the standard approach when a study’s evidence base is a corpus of institutional or textual artifacts rather than experimental data.