Atlas.ti

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 9, 2015 at 11:35 PM

It was many years and versions ago that I last evaluated Atlas.ti, so I can’t say anything specific about it any more. Even then I decided to go with NVivo instead.

Not that there was anything wrong with Atlas (they and NVivo pretty much offer the same functionality), but at the time Atlas was less visual, while I found NVivo’s interface more intuitive.

Eventually I abandoned NVivo for CT as I realised that QDA or CAQDAS software like these are just more constrained versions of a desktop wiki, and with CT I could create the exact tool I needed. But that was a fairly unorthodox approach. It was actually before CT v.6 introduced the “named blocks” (its own version of QDA-type qualitative coding functionality). And of course Atlas, NVivo etc. now offer all kinds of extra features, such as working with PDF files, images, and sound and video files directly, which CT can’t do.

With “named blocks” now one can replicate the text-only version of the qualitative coding process in CT much more straightforwardly than what I did, but it requires some fairly advanced familiarity with how CT works. I haven’t used it much, but there are others on the CT forum who use it routinely.

My advice would be to avoid the likes of Atlas or NVivo if you can. People (like PhD students or commercial researchers) are normally forced to use one or the other by their institution, and that’s the name of the game for these companies. It’s a turf war over university educators and administrators, who then force their choice of QDA on their students or institutions.

Why avoid them? While they are clearly very sophisticated software and can be incredibly useful, their licensing terms are just atrocious, and they were also very resource hungry when I tried them. I had to buy a new PC just to be able to run NVivo.

I was lucky that I could get a student licence for it, but I had to renew it annually, and when I forgot to do that for a couple of years and versions, the next time I found that I could no longer run NVivo (the licence expired) or access the data I coded in it. Even though I could have got a licence for the newer version that replaced it, the newer software was not compatible with the files from a couple of versions back. I don’t like to be treated like that as a customer, so since then I’ve stayed away from these “market leaders”...

How about Quirkos, Bill? I seem to recall they had a much more reasonable approach to licensing, and although I haven’t tried it, the software was looking good.