My Coding Experience With NVivo, Essay Example

My coding experience with NVivo can be described as exciting, fascinating, and somewhat challenging. First, the experience was exciting. From the moment that I accessed the software and activated it, I was greeted by a multifaceted interface that I immediately wished to explore. I was excited at the prospect of findings a more convenient way of coding interview data and findings themes.

After creating a new file and entering the data from the different interviews, I was fascinated at the way that NVivo quickly generated codes through autocoding. It was interesting how the software was able to breakdown interview data easily, at a pace that I would not have been able to do so on my own. What I also found interesting was the search tools that NVivo had, which enabled me to look for how many times a certain word or phrase was mentioned in the different interviews, and who among the different participants actually mentioned this.

However, there were some challenges that I faced in coding the interview data. First, I was somewhat unfamiliar with the controls. The interface was not as straightforward as the interface of SPSS, which I used to analyze quantitative data. However, I was able to get used to how the software works eventually, and I believe that I will be able to learn more about it with practice.

Based from my experience with Nvivo, there are a number of advantages and some disadvantages that it has in helping a qualitative research analyze data. In terms of advantages, Nvivo’s main advantage over hand coding and analysis is its search tool. In hand coding, it is difficult to immediately see commonalities. This is made much easier with Nvivo’s search tools. These tools allow the researcher to look into possible similarities in the data easier. It also makes it easier for the researcher to determine who among the participants can be categorized as having a particular opinion with regard to a specific interview question. Another advantage of the software is its ability to enable the research to create links across different inputs, key in annotations that would be important in writing up the analysis, and establishing relationships from the trends identified. All in all, Nvivo is superior to hand coding when it comes to organizing and searching through the data. However, the software also has some disadvantages. Before I used NVivo, I thought that it was software that can provide all of the necessary answers in qualitative analysis. That is, that it would simply tell me what the themes were and I would just need to write these down and discuss them. This turned out to not be the case. While Nvivo helps a great deal in organizing and sifting through the data, the output that it is able to give out is shallow, and the task of making sense of the data is still left entirely to the researcher. Also, another disadvantage of NVivo is that it is unable to locate possibly common ideas if they are worded differently. As such, two respondents may have similarities in their responses but these may not be detected by NVivo because the word choices of the two respondents are very different. It is still up to the researcher to identify these cases without the help of NVivo.

I found NVivo to be a very useful tool for qualitative research. However, I also found that its usage has clear limits. The qualitative researcher still remains to be the main instrument of data analysis in a qualitative study.