Based on the first 4 chapters it might appear to you that researchers producing empirical work have little in common (beyond following the basic rules and procedures we outlined in the previous chapters). Their data come from innumerable sources; and their tools for making use of the data are equally varied.

Still, there is at least one task in empirical scholarship that virtually all researchers undertake no matter whether their data are quantitative or qualitative, from where their hypotheses and data come, or how they plan to analyze the information they have collected. That task is coding data, which is the process of translating properties or attributes of the world (variables) into a form that is susceptible to systematic analysis. The process itself entails, first, developing a precise scheme to account for the values of each variable and, second, methodically and physically assigning all units a value for each variable. To provide a very simple example: for a study on the effect of gender on judging, the variable judge's gender can take on the value of male or female; that is the scheme. To complete the second task, we would assign each judge the value "male" or "female" based on his or her gender.

The discussion in this chapter corresponds to these two key phases of coding process, with the first section focusing on the development of a precise coding scheme and the second, on the assignment of values.

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