State the coding process in details

Coding involves assigning numbers or other symbols to answers so responses can be grouped into a limited number of categories or classes. Particularly, coding entails the assignment of numerical values to every individual response for every question within the survey.

Classifying of data into limited categories sacrifices some data detail but is essential for efficient analysis. Rather than requesting the word female or male in response to a question which asks for the identification of one's gender, we could use codes 'M' or 'F'. Generally this variable would be coded 1 for male and 2 for female or 0 and 1. In the same way, a Likert scale can be coded as: 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = neither agree nor disagree; 4 = agree and 5 = strongly agree.

Coding the data in this format helps the overall analysis process as most statistical software understand the numbers easily. Coding helps researcher to reduce several thousand replies to a few categories comprising the critical information required for analysis. In coding, categories are the partitioning of a set; and categorization is the process of using rules to partition a body of data.