Problems with coding.

So as I was reading Yin's article on case studies, it occurred to me that the discourse analysis I just peer reviewed is possibly a case study in that they attempt to examine "a contemporary phenomenon in its real-life context, especially when... the boundaries between the phenomenon and its context are not clearly evident" (59).Yin's article also mentions the case study which required field workers to "code" quantitative data into 202 categories (sounds labour-intensive), and this issue of "counting and coding" (more generally, I guess, just coding) also came up in the discourse analysis paper. Producing "coding" categories has to be tricky, because, as Yin says, those producing the categories often come up with too many categories to account for every detail, but I'd say researchers might also run the risk of producing too few categories and overgeneralizing. "Coding" seems to be an odd thing to do when you have very few categories, as they did in the discourse analysis paper. (I actually didn't really write about this in my peer review, but it occurs to me now that I've read the Yin article.) Their categories seemed entirely obvious -- support, opposition, neutral  -- and therefore the "coding" seemed a bit unnecessary. Perhaps if they'd included more examples of "problem" categories it would've seemed more "complete."