Resource pages for Handling Qualitative Data

          

Teach-yourself NVivo 7: the introductory tutorials

Welcome to the “do-it-yourself” tutorials for researchers and students who wish to learn NVivo 7. The ten tutorials are designed as exercises to take you through all the basic functions of the NVivo 7 software, with guidance to its interface and processes, as you set up and commence your own project.

There is symmetry between these tutorials and the chapters of my most recent text, but of course they can be independently used. Each Tutorial explores in software the techniques and processes described in a chapter of Handling Qualitative Data: a practical guide, London, Sage, 2005. Those chapters give advice and help with the research processes the software supports. I wrote the book to help researchers who have data and need research advice and skills in ways of handling data that have become available through qualitative software.

More about the book


If you need further help in moving from learning software to getting going in your own project, a free 24pp handbook, Up and Running in NVivo is available for download at www.lynrichards.org.

I have prepared these materials for a website to provide widest possible access to detailed help for qualitative software self-teaching, a cause I strongly support, and to allow revision of them as the software changes, as software does, with service packs and new releases. They have been very thoroughly checked by colleagues and testers at the time of publishing them, and will be revised when further changes in the software require this.

I particularly wish to thank Daniel Buffet, QSR’s Testing Manager, for his very detailed professional review and comments. Many other colleagues have given me valued feedback – and more is always gratefully received!

These tutorials are copyright to ensure that if they are reproduced, this is done in adequate context. Of course permission will be given for copying them in appropriate contexts.

© Copyright 2006 Lyn Richards

These tutorials are copyright to ensure that they are not reproduced partially or in ways that distort their content. They may not be reproduced without permission.

Please contact me at info@lynrichards.org if you seek permission to reproduce them in a research or teaching situation.


More information about NVivo

The software taught in these tutorials is NVivo for two reasons: it is the most used software for qualitative analysis, so the package most normally available for students and researchers. And it is the software I helped create, design, develop, document and teach through three revisions. The following links will take you to more information.

For more about the software, resources and information:
www.qsrinternational.com.

For the story of the company, and stages in the software:
http://www.qsrinternational.com/aboutus/company/company_history.htm.

For information about all qualitative software packages:
http://caqdas.soc.surrey.ac.uk.

For my own work, and other writing, and for qualitative research resources:
www.lynrichards.org.


The NVivo software

The software used in these tutorials is the latest version of NVivo, NVivo 7.0. If you are using the previous version, NVivo 2, click here for tutorials.

You will need to have a copy of the software to build your own project, using these tutorials. If you or your institution has no access to a license for NVivo 7, you can still find how it feels to work in the software by using the free (time-limited) demonstration version available from the QSR website, www.qsrinternational.com.

Since that demonstration version is time-limited, don’t download it until you are ready to commence the tutorials. Note that once its free time expires, you will not be able to load the free demo again on the same machine, unless QSR enables this for special reasons.

QSR NVivo was released in 2001. The version of NVivo described in these tutorials was named NVivo 7, because it is an upgrade path for both NVivo and its sister software, N6, the current version of the NUD*IST software. The new product, NVivo 7, was released end of February 2006.

For those who wish to compare NVivo 2 and NVivo 7, the topics of the two groups of tutorials has been kept as similar as possible, given new functions in NVivo 7.

If you began work on these tutorials in NVivo 2 and wish to continue in NVivo 7, this will not be a problem. You can import into NVivo 7 any project from N6 or NVivo 1 or 2 – or, indeed, NVivo 7.

Data for your project

The exercises for each Tutorial assume that you have data records available to you. There are many ways of making that data.

The Volunteering data

NVivo 7 ships with a copy of a project called Volunteering, which I created for the software’s online documentation. Also on the CD are the data sources for that project. This “project” is about the motivations of those who do volunteer work, images of volunteers, problems of attracting volunteers to assist organizations. The interviews are not “real” data – participants were colleagues, and names are not real. But the ideas and discussions are contributed by real people, many really interested in the topic, and collated by myself and Kristi Jackson in the US, whose own real research in the area is documented in the memos in the sample data provided. These give you the background to what became an absorbing project.

You can work with this sample project, if you wish. The files include interviews and focus groups as well as memos about the project, and you can use them to start your own project. You might conduct an interview of your own to explore attitudes to volunteer work amongst your family or friends. Now use the data to answer questions of your own. The volunteering data will be used in illustrations during these tutorials.

Using your own data

Alternatively, you might make a very small exploratory project with your own data. For these tutorials you need only a first research question and a few documents – five hour-long interviews or field note reports would be fine.

You can import existing data from any Word files. Or, if you wish to invent a small project for these exercises, go to Handling Qualitative Data , Chapter 2 for brief discussions of some of the many ways of making qualitative data, with references to other texts for detailed advice. In Chapter 3 is advice on making data records that will be rich and useful for your project.

Help for Teachers

Teachers using Handling Qualitative Data and these tutorials in their courses are welcome to contact me to discuss course content and others’ experiences: info@lynrichards.org

For NVivo software access and issues of licensing, a Teachers’ Handbook is available from QSR International, free in a .pdf format. Email info@qsrinternational.com to request a copy, or for further advice.

Supporting materials and sources of help

In the following exercises, you will learn very basic use of the software. If you want to go further with software learning, you will find information, workshops and personal consultancy in the software are available world-wide.

Like all users of the software, you can find help from many sources.


Using these tutorials

The ten tutorials can be followed by individual users working alone, or they can be incorporated in class laboratory sessions alongside the book chapters. They don’t explain the purposes of the processes they teach, but there are explanations of each in the chapter of the same number in Handling Qualitative Data.

Chapter summaries and software tutorials

Tutorial 1 - Setting Up Your Project

Tutorial 2 - Creating and Importing Sources

Tutorial 3 - Managing data: Cases, Attributes and Sets

Tutorial 4 - Editing and Linking: Getting “Up From The Data”

Tutorial 5 - Coding, and Working With Coded Data

        

Tutorial 6 - Relationships and Other Nodes: Handling Ideas

Tutorial 7 - Seeing It In Models

Tutorial 8 - Finding Items and Querying The Data

Tutorial 9 - Exploring Patterns in Matrices

Tutorial 10 - Reporting and Showing Your Project


I hope the tutorials, and the book, work for your purposes, and that you enjoy working with them as much as I’ve enjoyed the challenges of writing them and of developing software to help researchers do justice to qualitative data.

Lyn Richards,
Melbourne, August 2006.
info@lynrichards.org