Over the past few weeks, I have been busying creating a code book with my Sociology of Religion professor, a graduate student, and another undergraduate student. The other undergraduate student and I have also spent the last week coding news articles in ATLAS.ti with our code book.
The past few days the other undergraduate student and I have been focusing on articles in the New York Times from the 1980s that describe church and state interactions. I was very surprised by the amount of discussion in the 1980s about prayer in public schools. While today we know that mandated prayer is not allowed in public schools, it is interesting to read about how certain organizations were trying to justify allowing this type of prayer in public schools. I feel like I am learning a lot from reading these articles.
Working on the code book as we code is also an interesting process. The other undergraduate student and I have created a meeting schedule so that we can discuss any issues we have with the code book. We were surprised by how comprehensive our third draft of the code book was when we used it to code a selection of articles. This was surprising because my professor told us how difficult it is to usually get a code book to work well. We have only had to make smaller edits to the code book since we created this third draft.
Overall, the code book seems to be working very well, and I am excited to continue reading more of these articles.
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