Collaborative Codebook Development Across Information Worlds: Intersections Between Pedagogy, Theory, and Method in Three Dissertations

Dissertation work is traditionally a solo, perhaps isolating, endeavor. In qualitative content analysis in the social sciences, the student applies a codebook, whether of their own creation or an adaptation of an existing theory or framework, which is appropriate to their research context and method without collaborating with others. The theory of information worlds provides an analytical framework to analyze information behavior and use in social contexts without ascribing to or prescribing a particular methodology or approach. This article describes and discusses a novel collaborative effort to operationalize and develop codebooks for the theory of information worlds which was used across three methodologically diverse dissertations. Implications for methodology, pedagogy, and dissertation work are also discussed, with an emphasis on the ways in which a project such as this might inform the future teaching practices of doctoral students.