NVivo 10 launched

Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 28, 2012 at 12:49 PM

Cassius wrote:
>Thank you for the explanation. Considering the price of the software, isn’t there
>more to it?

Well, yes, of course, there are other features (such as the automating of analysis of survey results) and various other ways of linking and organising documents (video, sound, image etc.) and snippets. But the aggregation of quotes is the heart of it.

The price I think is indicative of the fact that the educational market (universities, post-graduate students) is a bit of a captive market. The software is mostly bought by institutions. There is a great deal of inertia there. If all the other PhD students around you are using NVivo or Atlas.ti, there are workshops on a monthly basis telling you how to use them, your supervisor tells you to use one or the other, then you are generally not going to be exploring other options because using one or the other becomes a sort of a seal of quality. It makes your research sound more serious.

In fact in the past this process of coding used to be done manually, mostly by using index cards - which is why ConnectedText is well placed to substitute these expensive software because (as Manfred has often argued, http://www.connectedtext.com/manfred.php), CT is an electronic form of an index card system).