Coding (social sciences)

Coding in social sciences refers to the process of taking a big pile of information and organizing it into smaller groups that make sense to us. Imagine you have a bunch of different colored toys and you want to put them in groups based on their colors. That's coding!

But instead of toys, social scientists might have a bunch of words or sentences that they want to organize. For example, they might have a lot of people's answers to a survey question about what their favorite color is. They would read through all the answers and group them together based on the different colors people said. Then, they could count up how many people picked each color and use that to learn more about what colors are popular.

This process of coding can be used for many different things in social sciences - from analyzing interviews with people to categorizing articles or news stories. It helps us make sense of a lot of information by breaking it down into smaller parts that we can understand!