STUDY 05
Reading the Route
"A method paper on turning a travelled route into comparable, codeable data."
PUBLISHEDCivic Technology2023
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Context
A study within the Civic Technology area of Dr. Okafor's wider research on daily mobility and access to opportunity, conducted in Lagos over 2023.
The Question
QUESTION
"How can a qualitative account of a journey be made comparable across hundreds of residents without losing what made it meaningful?"
Hypothesis
HYPOTHESIS
A structured coding scheme applied to travel diaries and interview transcripts can preserve individual nuance while enabling systematic comparison.
Method
Data
Findings
A shared coding scheme allowed diary entries from very different neighbourhoods to be compared directly.
MODERATE CONFIDENCEDataset
Sample
640 residents
Method
Variable
cross-neighbourhood theme consistency
Observation
The same handful of themes — uncertainty, cost anxiety, route familiarity — recurred across neighbourhoods with very different infrastructure.
What We Know / What We Still Don't Know
WHAT WE KNOW
A small set of recurring themes can organise a large body of route narratives without flattening their differences.
WHAT WE STILL DON'T KNOW
Whether this coding scheme generalises to cities with very different transit cultures.