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See What NVivo Can Do

See why NVivo is the most cited and powerful software for qualitative data analysis.

Discover NVivo’s Core Capabilities

NVivo helps you discover more from your qualitative and mixed methods data. Uncover richer insights and produce clearly articulated, defensible findings backed by rigorous evidence. Unlock insights in your data with powerful analysis.

Qualitative Research as an Iterative Process

Handling qualitative data is not usually a step-by-step process. Instead, it tends to be an iterative process where you explore, code, reflect, memo, code some more, query, and so on. For example, this picture shows a path you might take to investigate an interesting theme.

Read on to find out how to apply these steps in NVivo.

NVivo: Key Concepts

NVivo organizes, analyzes and visualizes qualitative data to find the patterns for rigorous results that can be shared with stakeholders.

Importing

Coding

Memos

Cases

Classifications

Queries

Visualizations

The type of material you include in your project depends on your research questions and methodology—NVivo lets you import a wide range of materials, including interview transcripts, journal articles, audio/video recordings, and social media content.

Coding brings together in one place all the references to specific themes, emotions, relationships or people, from your data.

Coding, or gathering material by topic or category, is a fundamental task for qualitative projects. It tends to be an iterative rather than a one-stage process, with the meaning and structure of your codes evolving over time.

You could start with ‘broad-brush’ coding to organize your material into broad topic areas (you can use Text Search queries to help with this)—then explore the code for each topic and do more detailed coding.

Essential to any research project is note keeping—for observations, ideas, reminders to yourself (and others), and keeping a journal so you have a record of how the project, and your thoughts, have developed. NVivo offers a range of ways to keep notes. Foremost amongst them are memos.

One of NVivo’s most powerful features is its ability to represent the people, institutions and places involved in your inquiry. In NVivo, these are called ‘cases’.

Cases are like containers that hold all the information related to a person, place or other unit of analysis. You can open a case to see all the information that has been coded there in the case.

When you begin a project, it is a good idea to decide on your units of analysis and plan for the cases you will need to represent them.

Case classifications allow you to record demographic or other data for the cases you create—e.g. age, occupation or population—you set yourself up to be able to make a whole range of analyses. Is there a difference between how younger and older people feel about an issue? Is education a factor? Are there relationships between population size and the factors you’re investigating?

Queries and visualizations support the iterative nature of qualitative research and can help you to investigate hunches as you progress through a project and validate your findings.

Queries help you to explore your data and investigate hunches as you progress through your project. You can:

Find and analyze the words or phrases in your files and codes.

Ask questions and find patterns based on your coding and check for coding consistency among team members.

Word frequency query

A good, quick way to see what's on the minds of your research subjects is to run a word frequency query over what they say—which terms come up the most?

Visualizations support the iterative nature of qualitative research and can help you at each stage of the research process.

Get started—set out and review initial ideas, hunches or theories related to your research question.

Research design and data collection—show how you arrived at your approach to data collection and analysis.

Data analysis (coding)—encourage deep thought by helping you build your knowledge about your research topic and gain a greater understanding of your project items.

Final write-up—include visualizations in your memos to document your findings, and export image files to include in your report or presentation.

Collaborate with Colleagues

Many projects involve multiple researchers working together. NVivo allows you to manage collaborative work, seamlessly sharing your files, data, notes, and results with your colleagues.

NVivo Collaboration Cloud

NVivo Collaboration Server

By enhancing the team experience with NVivo Collaboration Cloud, multiple users can connect to the same project to update, code, and analyze research in real-time.

Syncing projects across Mac and Windows does more than eliminate the file conversion process — with NVivo 14 and NVivo Collaboration Cloud, users can open projects across both Mac and Windows with ease.

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A central server at your institution holds all project files, allowing team members to work on the same projects at the same time, with the ability to see others' work as they save. Collaboration Server is only available for NVivo Windows.

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Experience the Power of NVivo 14 for Yourself

See how easy it is to collect, organize, and code qualitative data, then annotate, evaluate, collaborate on and finally write up your findings. Get started with NVivo today.

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