What should happen during adjudication?
Overview
Open disagreements, read the source context, and discuss whether the difference came from evidence boundaries, code definitions, hierarchy, interpretation, or simple omission. Record the decision and its reasoning. Update the codebook when a disagreement reveals ambiguity that could affect later coding.
What to do
- Review disagreement patterns before individual cases.
- Resolve concept-definition problems before boundary details.
- Document retained disagreement when consensus would hide meaningful interpretive difference.
- Apply agreed changes consistently to the remaining corpus.