Organising the chaos… the magic of NVivo

I’ve been learning loads about Nvivo this semester through training workshops and a one-to-one consultation. Actually it was the other way around since I booked a consultation first to look at my recent data from a survey of 460 records (called cases in NVivo terminology). A little more than an hour into the consultation I realised I had been wasting my time trying to code data in NVivo in the same way that I would code it in spreadsheet – duh! Rookie error that will not be repeated!

We walked through the steps that got me to this point. It seemed my efforts were not wasted but I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to move forward. With a wave of his magic wand the trainer, let’s call him Steve, showed me how to autocode the Excel file of data imported into NVivo – it was magic to watch. As he said: “this is where the magic happens” and happen it did. By the end of the consultation session I was pretty happy, no, let’s be truthful, I was ecstatic, with how NVivo magically autocoded my survey responses enabling me to move forward to the next stage of figuring out what all the data meant.

In the weeks that followed, with my brand new copy of the third edition of Jackson & Bazely by my side, I worked through Steve’s guidance, reformatting the Excel file to maximise its value in NVivo. I noted the file preparation tips which I’m happy to share here. These tips are based on my data so should be leveraged and adapted as appropriate.

Excel file preparation tips:

• Ensure one header row (Qualtrics export to Excel defaulted to two for me);
• Make the header row for each column meaningful eg. question number and short text;
• Add in an initial column to simply number all the records and delete default ResponseID column;
• Delete all unnecessary columns eg. duration to complete and anything that is not useful to the analysis;
• Delete any rows where participants did not provide consent;
• Where columns contain multiple choice selections break these out into separate columns to be more useful. Each cell should be a simple yes or no so break out video communications from audio communications into a column each. (In hindsight I might have designed the survey to ease this process but it was fine and I’ll know for next time).

I have a number of other tips that I will save for another time since it seems that my NVivo journey is only beginning.

This post is one in a series of “organising the chaos” posts on tools I have used with reasonable success in the structured part of my PhD programme. My experience should support my productivity and organisation for my thesis research that starts next month. Next month already?! Where did those two years go???

Until next year, Sandra

Featured image courtesy of Bitmoji

Reference: Jackson, K., & Bazeley, P. (2019). Qualitative data analysis with NVivo (Third ed.). London: Sage.