Developing categories and themes

There are numerous ways of systematically moving from assigning codes to grouping them into categories and generating themes. Some qualitative researchers recommend using a sorting technique, while others prefer a meaning-making technique, which involves looking for the underlying meanings of the codes – leading to the development of categories/themes. Irrespective of the strategy we use, it is very important to make sure that the categories/themes that emerge are addressing the research question(s) or purpose and, at the same time, representing the relevant information in the data. In this chapter, I present two techniques of transforming codes into categories and themes. They are presumption-focused coding strategy and sorting strategy.