• Listen with openness: suspend your judgments and biases and listen for those things with which you agree as well as those you might challenge;
• Listen with curiosity: engage your desire to learn, rather than to try to “fix” anything;
• Listen without asking questions that interrupt the speaker: jot down your questions and save them for later;
• Listen for patterns and for what is not being said; and, finally,
• Listen with intention: what do you intend to learn or do with the information you’ll learn?

Watch this TED Talk on listening. 

A systematic way to code data is to ask yourself the following questions as you read the

text:

 What is this saying? What does it represent?

 What is this an example of?

 What do I see is going on here?

 What is happening?

 What kind of events are at issue here?

 What is trying to be conveyed?