Organising My Primary Research: Building the Coding Workbook

Following the completion of my questionnaire, I needed to find a way of organising the responses that would allow me to analyse the data systematically rather than simply reading through each response individually.

I decided to create an Excel workbook specifically for the coding process. At this stage, I had collected 10 responses containing good qualitative information about participants’ experiences of travel.

The Structure

Rather than placing everything onto one spreadsheet, I separated the workbook into different sections:

• Basic Info – an overview of how I intended to use the workbook.
• Raw Responses – the original questionnaire responses, kept unchanged.
• Coding Workspace – a separate area where individual responses could be analysed and coded.
• Participant Summary – an overview of the participants and their responses.
• Codebook – a space to record and develop codes as patterns began to emerge.

Keeping the raw responses separate felt particularly important. It meant I always had an untouched version of the original data to return to while allowing the Coding Workspace to become more experimental.

Why I Created the Workbook

The purpose of creating this structure was not simply to make the data look organised. I wanted to create a clear process between collecting information and interpreting it.

My workflow became:

Raw Response → Initial Code → Related Codes → Candidate Themes → Refined Themes

At this stage, the later sections remain deliberately open. I do not want to decide what my themes are before I have properly analysed what participants have said.

Creating the workbook made the primary research feel much more manageable. Rather than looking at 10 complete questionnaire responses at once, I can now work through individual pieces of information and gradually identify connections between them.

It has also given me a clearer record of how my interpretation develops. This feels important because I want the eventual findings to be grounded in what participants actually told me rather than fitting their responses around assumptions I already have about autistic travel experiences.

The next stage is to begin coding the qualitative responses and see what patterns emerge naturally from the data.