NVivo workshop
I'm a little behind on updates, as it's been a hell of a busy week.
On Monday 23/11, I attended a full-day workshop on NVivo 8. It's a piece of software used to help analyse qualitative data: things like interviews, images, audio and video. 12-month licenses are available for the desktop PCs at work, but it's unfortunately not available on a Mac (short of running it through BootCamp).
I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. It's extremely flexible, and should work for a range of different research methodologies - though some have claimed that it's best for grounded theory work.
Any data (usually text from a transcript, or notes made for a specific part of a media file) can be tagged with one or more "nodes" - thematic keywords, essentially working like the many different highlighters and sticky notes that I've been using on my hardcopies. Nodes can be "free" or use a tree-structure if you want to break a concept down into smaller parts, and they can be (and usually are) modified frequently during the analysis.
You can choose from a few different visual representations of your nodes - my favourite is a series of coloured stripes running down the side of the screen, level with the relevant parts in the transcript. The first is a greyscale bar showing the density of tags applied to each section (darker grey = more keywords), which gives a very quick way of seeing which areas were most valuable, or which haven't had much attention paid to them yet. Other bands of colour highlight specific nodes: the 5 most frequently used, or any custom selection.
You can search through nodes, to quickly find all the quotes (linked back to original sources) that have been assigned to a particular node. This is a handy one when looking for a couple of additional quotes for a paper - it saves leafing through all the pages looking for annotations.
It's also possible to do searches: "what statements about technological aptitude were made by people over the age of 45?" or "did anyone talk about trust or security when they discussed using an unfamiliar website?"
Above all else, it's a powerful way of managing the large amounts of data that my interviews will generate. I'd like to learn how to use it's more advanced functions, but even if I just use it as a management tool, it will be worth the investment of time in discovering how to set it up.
On Monday 23/11, I attended a full-day workshop on NVivo 8. It's a piece of software used to help analyse qualitative data: things like interviews, images, audio and video. 12-month licenses are available for the desktop PCs at work, but it's unfortunately not available on a Mac (short of running it through BootCamp).
I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. It's extremely flexible, and should work for a range of different research methodologies - though some have claimed that it's best for grounded theory work.
Any data (usually text from a transcript, or notes made for a specific part of a media file) can be tagged with one or more "nodes" - thematic keywords, essentially working like the many different highlighters and sticky notes that I've been using on my hardcopies. Nodes can be "free" or use a tree-structure if you want to break a concept down into smaller parts, and they can be (and usually are) modified frequently during the analysis.
You can choose from a few different visual representations of your nodes - my favourite is a series of coloured stripes running down the side of the screen, level with the relevant parts in the transcript. The first is a greyscale bar showing the density of tags applied to each section (darker grey = more keywords), which gives a very quick way of seeing which areas were most valuable, or which haven't had much attention paid to them yet. Other bands of colour highlight specific nodes: the 5 most frequently used, or any custom selection.
You can search through nodes, to quickly find all the quotes (linked back to original sources) that have been assigned to a particular node. This is a handy one when looking for a couple of additional quotes for a paper - it saves leafing through all the pages looking for annotations.
It's also possible to do searches: "what statements about technological aptitude were made by people over the age of 45?" or "did anyone talk about trust or security when they discussed using an unfamiliar website?"
Above all else, it's a powerful way of managing the large amounts of data that my interviews will generate. I'd like to learn how to use it's more advanced functions, but even if I just use it as a management tool, it will be worth the investment of time in discovering how to set it up.