NVivo 10 launched

Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 28, 2012 at 11:24 AM

Cassius wrote:
>Interesting. Do these applications try to do it all automatically, or is the user
>deeply involved in determining the categories and judging what belongs in a category
>and what does not? I expect that a fair amount of judgment and intuition would be
>involved because much of the analysis often would include a fair amount of
>subjectivity.

Primarily it is the subjective judgement of the user, although usually the user is guided by a theory he or she had chosen that guides the attention and recognition of categories. These software work like this:
1. I’m reading a long document (e.g. a transcript of a 2-hr interview).
2. As I read, I highlight sections of text that contain interesting information or answers to my research question and mark them by giving them a “code” (a category that describes them).
3. The software aggregates all the quotes with the same “code” into their own separate documents, which can be further analysed.

So these software are in a way for aggregating and organising quotes. The purpose is to discover new patterns in the material, the existence of new entities (categories) or new relationships between entities.