I hope that this is a general question that you can answer because I've looked at the MAXQDA videos and webinars and they don't seem to address this issue. After coding your interview data, prior to categorizing the codes into themes, does MAXQDA have a way to merge all code segments that were mentioned by the same interviewee into one code, so that the statements are captured but the code doesn't get counted twice. So, I'd like to capture how something was said, but I don't necessarily want it to produce a second code since it's coming from the same person that is expressing the same idea but in a different way (I'm doing line by line coding)... I am concerned that by simply merging the codes this will be an over-inflated view of the code, and appear as if more people are saying the same thing. In other words, instead of counting how many times it is said by one person, I'd like it to count how many times different people had the same or similar experience. However, I still would like to be able to capture what was said without necessarily counting it as a new instance of the same code. For example in the code system, I have a lot of 1's that I would like to combine (merge) without making the total accumulate to 2 or 3 because its coming from the same person... Hopefully, the answer is that I do not need to worry about this and MAXQDA will handle it because it knows that its coming from the same person file/document? :D
Version: MAXQDA 2022
System: Windows 11