In-vivo coding: What does this mean? The term in-vivo comes from grounded theory research and means that words or terms used by the interviewees are so remarkable that they should be taken as codes. In-vivo coding adds these terms of the respondents as codes and codes the text passage at the same time. Let’s see how it works in MAXQDA!
An example
In the screenshot below you can see the term “sense of community and fellowship” in our interview, which we feel is remarkable and should be used as a code concept.
And this is how it works:
- Select the words from your document, rightclick on the selection, and choose “Code In-vivo”, or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-I (Windows) or Command-Option-I (Mac).
- The words are now used to create a code, and the selected text passage is automatically coded with the term.
If you want to learn more about coding with MAXQDA in general, check out this video tutorial:
Vive the In-vivo coding! 🙂
In-Vivo and Further Coding Methods in the MAXQDA Manual
Editor’s note: this post has been updated from its original version published in May 2016.
