“Remote and Equitable Inductive Analysis for Global Health Teams: Using Digital Tools to foster Equity and Collaboration in Qualitative Global Health Research via the R-EIGHT Method”.

Johnson-Peretz J, Arunga T, Lee J, et al. (2024).  International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

Cultural rigour (Lock et al., 2021) “affirms the value of experiential knowledge and stresses a collaborative process” (Leung et al., 2004).

Synopsis: We describe a newly-developed, digital approach that integrates findings from our qualitative team, which we call R-EIGHT (Remote and Equitable Inductive Analysis for Global Health Teams), to speed the inductive coding process without sacrificing rigour, while remaining accessible to geographically dispersed teams. This is especially crucial in global health partnerships where on-the-ground researchers may have less input into codebook development compared to in-the-office researchers. 
Method: The method consists of eight steps.
(1) participant interviews are transcribed, during which time...
(2) A team member develops an a priori codebook from existing interview guides and study protocols.
(3) Each team member is given a transcript or set of transcripts for initial or line-by-line coding using the ‘comment’ function in MS Word.
(4) The team members then send their coded or commented-upon transcripts to a central teammate responsible for merging the commented-upon documents. This will produce a document in which teammate comments for a given section all appear together in a side column.
(5) The team meets to review the comments, which are conveniently grouped together around the relevant text, to foster discussion and compare the language each coder is using.
(6) The team compares these inductively-derived codes with any a priori codes (if used) in axial or second-cycle coding to develop focused codes, in order to...
(7) Define the range of application of an a priori code, and to add new parent and child codes to the codebook as necessary.
(8) Finalise the codebook for coding the remaining data sets. 
Key Contribution: The technique we developed a) speeds the process of inductive coding as a team, b) visually displays interpretive consensus, and c) when appropriate fosters streamlined integration of inductive findings into codebooks. Because it involves all team members, our approach helps break the divide between in-office and on-the-ground teams, fostering integrated and representative contributions from all globally-dispersed team members.