Coding Using NVivo Software, Essay Example

Introduction to NVivo

NVivo is a software that analyzes different forms of data which is unstructured. It is a software which quickly interrogates the data using visualization tools, query and a powerful search. NVivo software facilitates the coding process. It helps in organizing, collecting, and analyzing the content from surveys, audios, interviews, social media, focus group, webpages and videos (Brandão, 2014). Using NVivo software is beneficial because it allows coding to be done in an automated fashion, rather than by hand. However, the software is not as much useful when we address the issues of reliability and validity in the thematic ideas (Welsh, 2002). It is therefore necessary to use a combination of hand and software analysis when conducting qualitative studies.

Application of NVivo Coding Software

To determine how to use NVivo to assess qualitative data, I interviewed three of my colleagues about someone they admired. Participants were asked to describe an individual they admire, describe how they define influential people, explain the relationship between this definition and the person they admire, describe why they admire a selected person, name characteristics that make the person admirable, and how this understanding impacts their ability to succeed in life. For the purposes of this analysis, I focused on the description of the person that the participants’ admired so that I could compare the results I received using NVivo to the results I would receive by conducting the coding process by hand.

Results

The characteristics that were used to describe the person admired by my interviewees were described in a variety of ways. The first interviewee described this individual by listing jobs he is good at, the second individual noted positive characteristics of the person, and the third used a combination of these two approaches. Therefore, the distinct jobs listed can be coded as “job” if this were to be done by hand, and the positive characteristics could be sorted to create a more general understanding of the individuals being described. “Leader” and “good person” would be two such of these terms. Nodes were grouped using this understanding in NVivo.

The screen capture from NVivo below indicates that only one job was listed, there is one positive characteristic that is not classified as “great person” or “leader”, and one characteristic in each of these sub-nodes. I do not believe that I would have coded this the same way if I were to do so by hand, which indicates that it may be necessary for me to make more specific requirements for the nodes. Overall, I see that this is a valuable program for coding when there is a large amount of qualitative data to be analyzed, but I prefer coding by hand when it is reasonable to do so because it allows me to have a greater degree of control over the terms I use to describe the information that I have collected. Furthermore, going through information manually helps the researcher gain a greater understanding of the intention of certain key words, which cannot always be gained when using a computer program.

References

Welsh, E. (2002, May). Dealing with data: Using NVivo in the qualitative data analysis process. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 3, No. 2).

Brandão, C. (2014). P. Bazeley and K. Jackson, Qualitative Data Analysis with NVivo. Qualitative Research in Psychology, (just-accepted).