Before you begin, make sure you have NVivo 12 installed. If you don’t, follow these instructions to request a free license key and install the software.
You’ll also need to download some datasets that we’ve provided for this tutorial. Create a new folder on your computer to store the tutorial files. Download this zip file containing all the datasets you will need for the tutorial to that new folder. Finally, extract the files into that new folder.
This tutorial is adapted from a recorded NVivo 12 workshop, which you can view here.
Table of Contents
Creating a New Project
Explore the Interface
Import Data
Creating Nodes and Coding
Working with Nodes
Creating Notes
Case Classification and Cases
Word Frequency and Text Queries
Coding Queries
Matrix Coding and Crosstab Queries
Export Data
Resources to Learn More
Test your Understanding Answers
Part 1 – The Basics
Creating a New Project
1. First start up NVivo 12.
2. From the main screen, you will see that there are sample projects you can explore to get a feel for NVivo. We will look at one of these later. There are also several links to training and tutorials to learn more. But for us, let’s click on Create new project to get started.
3. You must give your project and project file a name, so let’s call them both “NVivo Workshop”. You can add a description if you want.
4. Then select where you want to save the project file. Use the drop-down arrow to browse folders. Let’s save it where we have put all our other workshop files.
5. Finally select Create to create your new project.
Explore the Interface
1. Let’s briefly look around before we get started. First off, the left side menu helps you navigate the various items of your project, such as your files, your themes, notes, queries, etc. We will talk about these sections as we use the tool.
2. If you want to save your project manually (which you should do periodically), or create or open a new project, you can use the File menu from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
3. If you select NVivo 12 from the menu bar, and then Licensing, you will see an option to Replace License, where you can update your license key, when you receive a new one each year.
Import Data
Next, let’s import some data so we can start using the tool. We will be using transcripts from interviews and focus groups run for a US data center study. As mentioned before, NVivo helps you get organized, so before we import in some data, let’s create some folders to organize our data.
1. From the left menu, under Data, hold down the Control key and click on Files and select New Folder... from the context menu. Let’s call it “Interviews” and click on Done.
2. Create one more folder called “Focus Groups”.
3. Next, select the Data menu (NOT from the menu bar, but from within the program).
4. Here you can see all the various types of files that NVivo can import. To start, let’s import in our interview transcripts. Make sure that the Interviews folder is selected on the left. Then select Documents from the Data menu.
5. Browse to the folder called “DCEE Focus Groups and Interviews,” which has all the study files we will look at today.
6. Highlight only the files starting with “Data Center Interview” in the title in our folder by selecting the first one, holding down the Shift key, and then selecting the last one. You should have 7 files highlighted. Then select Import. This may take a moment to complete.
7. Let’s do something similar to import in the focus group information. Select the Focus Groups folder on the left. Then select Documents from the Data menu.
8. You should still be in the same folder as last time. This time highlight the files starting with “NYC” in the title. You should have 8 files and a mix of PDFs and Word Documents. Then select Import to import those focus groups files into the Focus Groups folder.
9. These files are now all copied into your project file. You can see from the Data menu that there are many different file types that can be imported. For example, you can connect to reference managers to pull in your data, or import in audio files, images, or videos. We won’t be covering them all in this tutorial, but be sure to explore your options later.
Note: If you’re interested in learning more about importing other common data sources into NVivo, check out our tutorial on importing webpages as PDFs and survey data!
Creating Nodes and Coding
One of the main tasks NVivo is used for is coding. NVivo has a Codes section from the left menu, with a folder called Nodes. NVivo calls your codes or themes “Nodes.” These nodes act like containers to hold all the references to that theme.
If you have already decided upon codes ahead of time (following a deductive approach to coding), you can add these codes to NVivo and then start using them. Other times, as mentioned, you will be reading your materials in NVivo and creating codes as you go (an inductive approach to coding). And sometimes you will do a combination of this, where you have a rough idea of some themes you expect to see, but then new themes might emerge for you as your read through the materials. For this example, let’s try this combo method. First, we will create a few nodes that we will use to code our materials, and then I will show you how to create nodes on the fly as you are reading.
1. Select the Nodes folder from the left menu. Then from the Create menu from within the program, select Node to create a new node.
2. For the node name call it “Budget”. You can add a description for your nodes if you like. You can describe them in more detail and give examples of where it would be applied to understand how to use it in coding. We will just leave it blank for now. Ignore the “Aggregate coding from children” option for now. We will discuss it later. Select Done.
3. You should now see our new Budget node listed in the Nodes folder.
4. Repeat the last three steps to also create a node called “Maintenance.” If you make a mistake, you can always select a Node and hit the Delete key to remove it (be careful with this option if you have started coding!).
5. You can also edit your nodes after creating them. Hold down the Control key and click on a node to bring up the context menu.
6. If you select Get Info, you can rename it or add a description.
7. Now that we have a couple nodes, let’s use them to do some coding. To open up one of our imported files, from the left menu, go to the Interviews folder under Files and double click on the first interview transcript to open it in NVivo.
Note: NVivo can open a lot of different file types directly in the tool. The files will be open as read-only, meaning you can’t edit them. This is intentional to prevent error. However, if you happen to notice an error you want to correct, you can select the Edit checkbox at the top of the file. Then you will be able to make changes to the file. Remove the checkmark by clicking on it, to finish editing.
8. With the file open, you can then read through it and code. Highlight some text you want to code, and then hold down the Control key and click on the highlighted text to bring up the context menu.
9. Select Code Selection, and then At Existing Nodes or Cases…
10. Next, put a checkmark next to the Node you want to use to code this text, such as Budget. Then click on Select. Now it is coded.
Note: Generally, you want the text to match the coding category, but for now, don’t worry if the text doesn’t match, this is just to quickly show you how it works.
11. Let’s look at an alternative quick way to code. This time before you code, click on the Nodes folder. This should open up the Nodes list next to your transcript.
12. Highlight some text you want to code, and then drag the highlighted text over to the Node you want to code it. Let’s drag it over to the Maintenance node. This is a fast and visual way to code. This is a good approach, as you can see the full list of nodes while you are coding.
13. So far we have been coding using our pre-made nodes. However, sometimes, something unexpected might come up that you want to create a new node to code it. Highlight some text, and then hold down the Control key and click on it to bring up the context menu.
14. Now, select Code Selection and then select At New Node….
15. Here you can give it a name, for example, “Teamwork” and select Done to create a new node on the fly.
16. So far we have been coding Word documents, but let’s look at the PDFs we imported as well. First close the current interview transcript you have been working with by going to the View menu from within the program and selecting Close. You can use this to close windows in general.
17. You can alternatively close windows by going to the Open Items section at the bottom of the left menu and hover over an item to get a small x that you can click to close it. Throughout this tutorial, the View Menu is used, but either way works.
18. Go to the Focus Groups folder and open up “NYC Data Center FG1 Questionnaire 7” (you might have to resize the window and/or column to read the full names of the files).
19. This PDF file has been OCR’ed, meaning you can select text and code it as we have done before. Try selecting some text.
20. Now open up “NYC Data Center FG1 Questionnaire 14.”
21. This PDF file has not been OCR’ed, meaning you can’t select the text and code it as we have done before. Instead NVivo treats this more like an image. You can draw a box around a section of text that you would like to code to select it, and then code as normal. Generally, though, it is better to make sure that any PDFs you import into NVivo are OCR’ed for ease of coding. This will also be important when running queries, which we will look at later. For now, close these two PDFs, using the View Menu’s Close All option.
Note: If OCR’ing PDFs is new to you, this guide might help.
22. Go to the Nodes folder from the left menu, and double click on a Node that has some references (meaning it has been used to code some text).
23. Here you will see all the snippets of text that were coded to this Node.
24. If you later realize that you mistakenly coded something you didn’t mean to code, you can uncode it. Highlight one of the references listed. Hold down control and click, select Uncode Selection, and then select At This Node.
Working with Nodes
1. Before we work some more with Nodes, create two more nodes called “Energy Efficiency” and “Water Consumption”.
2. Next, code at least 5 small text fragments to each new node.
3. You can see now there are useful counts associated with our nodes to see how many files have content that has been coded in that node, and how many text snippets or references have been coded into that node.
4. You will notice that all of our nodes are top-level or parent nodes, meaning we haven’t established a hierarchy, none of our nodes are nested under other nodes. NVivo can help you organize your nodes in a hierarchical structure. You are often, in the end, trying to create a hierarchical nodes list to group common themes together into broader themes to help make sense of your coding. Create a new node and call it Sustainability.
5. You could use this node to thematically group some of your existing nodes. Drag Energy Efficiency and Water Consumption onto the Sustainability node (First click on a node to highlight, wait a moment, then drag it on).
6. Now you can see that they are grouped beneath. Nodes grouped beneath another node are called Child Nodes.
7. You can use Sustainability as its own broader node now in coding, or just keep it as a heading in the hierarchy. If you double click on Sustainability, you should see an empty window pop up as there are no references coded to that Node right now.
8. Hold down the Control key and click on Sustainability and select Get Info.
9. Click the box next to Aggregate Coding from children. Then click OK.
10. Now you will see all the references to it, plus its children nodes, show up in the window that should be still open. You will need to decide how to want to handle your node hierarchies in terms of this aggregation for your own projects. In some cases, this is very useful, but it may affect queries where references are double counted for the parent and the child. We will talk more about queries later in the tutorial.
11. In the window with all the Sustainability references, highlight all the text. A quick way to do this is to click anywhere in that window and press Command key and “A” on your keyboard at the same time to select all.
12. Then go to the View menu in the program, select the Node drop-down menu and pick Broad.
13. You will see that the references have changed. There is grey text that isn’t coded, but comes directly before or after the coded text to give you more context for what you have coded. This is useful when examining small snippets of coded text. You can apply this Broad context (or explore the other options in the menu) any time you are presented with a list of references.
14. Close the window for now by clicking on Close in the View menu.
15. Another way to get a better idea of how your files are coded is to use coding stripes and highlighting. First, go to your interviews folder. You can see how many nodes have been applied to the content and how many references in the document have been coded.
16. Double click on an interview that has some coded references.
17. From the View menu, select the Coding Stripes drop-down menu and pick All Nodes Coding.
18. As you scroll through the document, you should see coloured stripes along the right to tell you what parts of the document have been coded and how.
19. Next, from the View menu, select the Highlight drop-down menu and pick Coding for All Nodes.
20. You will see the coded text in yellow highlighting throughout the document.
Creating Notes
1. Let’s move on to another use of NVivo. You can create different types of notes to capture your thoughts on some text in a file, a file itself, or the project as a whole. For example, if you want to make a note about something that has come up in the text, you would use annotations. Open up one of the interview files (if you don’t have one open already), highlight some text, hold down the Control key and click on it, and select New Annotation.
2. A small pop up window will appear, where you can add your note. Type out a small note, such as “This is important!” When you’re done typing your note, just click on the document again. You will see that annotations are highlighted in blue. You can always hover over the blue highlighted text to see the pop-up window with the note again. Close the file using View menu, and then selecting Close.
3. Let’s say instead that you want to make a note about this whole interview file that you had open. Go to the Interviews folder and hold down the Control key and click on an interview file. Select Memo Link and then Link to New Memo.
4. Give your memo a name, such as “Interview Memo” and click on Done.
5. You will be given a blank page where you can write a detailed memo about that file. Perhaps, for example, this interview was held in poor conditions, such as a noisy coffee shop, that might have influenced what was talked about. You could note that here.
6. Once you close the window using the View menu option, the memo is saved and linked to this file. You should see a small icon next to the interview in the list for the memo link when you have the interview list opened completely (with no other files open to the right of it).
7. To view the memo link, hold down the Control key and click on the file again, select Memo Link and then Open Linked Memo.
8. To see annotations you have created all in one place, using the left menu, under Notes, click on Annotations.
9. To see the memo links, under Notes, click on Memos.
10. Finally, you can also create a note that applies to the entire project, for example, maybe some ideas you have about how the research is going or new themes that are emerging. With the memos folder highlighted, go to the Create menu, and select Memo.
11. Give it a name, such as “Project Memo” and click on Done.
12. Type some notes, such as “The project needs to be reviewed” and then close it from the View menu to save it. You can always double click on it from the list of memos to re-open it.
Case Classification and Cases
If you have demographics or other important attributes that you want to incorporate into your study, case classifications and cases can help. For example, if you were analyzing interview transcripts, you might want to create a case classification called “Interviewees” with attributes such as their name, age, education, job title, etc. Once your case classification is in place that defines what characteristics you want to capture for your interviewees, you could then create one case for each interviewee with those attributes filled in. So for example, if you interviewed someone named Geeta, you would create a case called Geeta (or some ID number if needed for confidentiality) with information about Geeta. You would then use that Geeta case to code all the files/content that are associated with Geeta (where the Case acts like a Node). Later you can then run queries that incorporate that information to answer questions such as, do executives talk more about sustainability? We will talk about how to run queries later in the tutorial.
You can manually create case classifications and cases, but often times, it is easier and more common to upload a spreadsheet with all the information for the cases. Let’s try that now.
1. For our project, we have a file called Interviewees.csv. Open it up and take a look. It lists our interviewees and their attributes. Attributes in NVivo work best when they are categorical variables. NVivo would call this a classification sheet. Now close it and go back to NVivo.
2. From the Data menu, select Classification Sheets.
3. Browse to the Interviewees.csv file and click on Open.
4. From the Classification Type drop-down menu, make sure it says Case Classification. Next to Create new classification, type in “Interviewees” (to give it that name) and then keep the rest of the defaults (where there should just be a checkmark next to Create new attributes if they do not exist) and click on Next.
5. Our classification sheet’s first column provides the name of each case (i.e., the interviewee’s first name). Keep the defaults here (where there should be a checkmark next to Create new cases if they do not exist) and then click on Next.
6. Then click on Import. It should open up the newly created Interviewees case classification sheet and attributes.
7. Click on Classification Sheet at the top of that window to see something that resembles the csv file we imported.
8. From the left menu, under Cases, click on Cases to see our newly created cases. These cases can now be used in coding the same way nodes are used.
9. We can take advantage of NVivo’s autocoding features to allow us to identify the interviewee’s responses in a file and code them automatically into the appropriate case. From the left menu, under Files, go to Interviews. Hold down the Control key and click on the “Data Center Interview Transcript oct3_2014” file and select Auto Code, and then select By Speaker…
10. First, make sure that under What would you like to classify your cases as? it has Existing classification, Interviewees selected.
11. Next, our transcripts are formatted in a consistent manner so we can always pick out who is speaking because the text is labeled as “INT:” for the interviewer’s words, and the person’s name in capital letters followed by a colon for the interviewee’s words. We need to tell NVivo who are all the unique speakers in this document. Under Enter the names of the speakers, type in “INT” and hit Enter. Then type in BASEL and hit the TAB key. You should check the preview on the right to confirm that NVivo is picking up each unique speaker by highlighting them in different colours. If it looks correct, click on Auto Code. This should code everything that Basel said in the transcript with Basel’s case.
12. From the left menu, under Cases, click on Cases. Then double click on Basel. You should see everything that Basel said in his interview. These words are coded to this case. The BASEL case node is now linked to Basel’s interview responses.
Part 2 - Queries
In this second part of the tutorial we will be looking at queries. One advantage of putting all your documents and coding in one NVivo project, is that you then have the ability to query the information to gain more insights.
Queries work better for larger projects with a lot of coding already completed, so we’re going to work with the sample project that comes with NVivo for this next section.
Word Frequency and Text Queries
1. First, make sure you have saved and closed any previous projects you had open.
2. From the File Menu, select Create Copy of Sample Project to use a ready-made project that comes with NVivo. Data in this sample project are drawn from a two-year research study (2008- 2009) undertaken by researchers from the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment at the Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C. The study documented community perceptions of development and land-use change on coastal communities in the Down East area of Carteret County, North Carolina, USA.
3. A window will pop-up asking if you want to rename the project and if you want to adjust where it saves. Let’s keep the name, but make sure it is saving with your other workshop files. Then click on Save.
4. Next let’s see how queries can help us make sense of this project. Go to the Query menu from within the program to see all the queries available to you.
5. Let’s start with the second option – the Word Frequency query, which helps us to identify frequently occurring terms in content. This is a great query to start with to get a sense of the content or topic of your data, by looking at the most common words used in a particular file or your whole project. Select Word Frequency from the Query menu.
6. First, you’re asked where you want to search. This is a common setting for most queries. The default option is to search everywhere in the project. You could however, select particular files or folders that you want to search by choosing the second or third options. For example, if we only want to search Interviews, and we’ve been very organized and put all of our interview transcripts into a folder called Interviews, we could select the third option, Items in Selected Folders. However, our interview folder has a combination of text, plus audio and video files. If we want to only select the text transcripts, we’d select the second option. Let’s try that. Choose Selected Items for this example.
7. Then expand Files in the folder tree to see our interview folder. Put a checkmark next to the Interviews folder to select everything in that folder to start, but then unselect the 3 A/V files (they have different icons than all the rest). So only the text transcripts should be selected for our search. Then click on Select.
8. Now we can make adjustments to the settings of our word frequency query. Next to Finding matches, there are some useful settings. If you select the second option, include stemmed words, it can group a word with all its different word endings together, so they don’t take up distinct spots in our top words list. For example, “run,” “runs,” and “running” would just be grouped together and then tallied once. Select Include stemmed words for this example.
9. Next, instead of 1000 words, let’s change Display words on the left to 100 most frequent for this example. Minimum word length can remain at 3 characters.
10. When all the settings are in place, click on Run Query on the top right.
11. Now we should see the results of our query. You should see a list of the top most common words in our interview transcripts, sorted with most common at the top. It tells you how many times the word (or group of similar words in our case) occurred and the last column shows you what words were grouped together.
12. Just to note, word frequency lists normally ignore stop words, which are really common words that wouldn’t be useful to analysis. For English, that would be words like “a,” “the,” “and,” etc. When you’re looking at this list of results, if you see a word that doesn’t really have much meaning in this context, such as “things,” you could add it to the stop words list and re-run the query so it’ll ignore it. Let’s try an example. Hold down the Control key and click on “things” and select Add to Stop Words List.
13. Then click on Run Query to re-run the query. You should see that “things” is now missing from the list.
14. To see the Stop Words list, and even reset it, you have to go to the File menu from the menu bar at the top, and select Project Properties.
15. Here in the General tab, you can select the Text Content Language. The default is English (US), but you can see other options. This doesn’t affect the interface, but is important for certain queries, such as word frequency queries and affects the stop words list. For example, you could have an English interface for NVivo, but be analyzing interview transcripts that are in French, by selecting French here. Click on the Stop Words… button to see the list of stop words in use and select Restore Defaults to reset the list to the default, if you wish. Let’s just click cancel twice for now and go back to the results of our query.
16. You can also export these results into a spreadsheet by holding down the Control key and clicking on the table and selecting Export.
17. Browse to the workshop folder, give the file a name or keep the default, change the File Format to Tab Separated Value (to make it a spreadsheet) and click on Save.
18. If we go back to the query results window, just above the table, you will see two tabs: Summary and Word Cloud. We are in the Summary tab. Click on Word Cloud. This shows the more frequent words, where the larger the word is, the more frequently it occurs, which is a common way to display this type of result. (Might take a few seconds to load).
19. You can click on the Gallery button to select different themes to customize your word cloud.
20. You can also hold down the Control key and click on the word cloud, and then select Export to export it as an image or PDF to use later in a report.
21. Once you’re done looking at the results of a query, go to the View menu, and click on Close.
22. Next, let’s look at the Text Search query, which can be used to see where particular terms occur in the content. Select Text Search from the Query Menu.
23. You can use it to find a word or phrase. You can search for phrases by putting them in quotation marks. Let’s try typing “family” in the search box and choose Include stemmed words, so that it will also search for “families” similar to what we did in the Word Frequency query.
24. Next, we would select where it should search. As before the default is all the documents in the project. Let’s keep the default this time and just run the query. Select Run Query at the top.
25. You will be presented with a list of project files that contain that reference. You can double click on a file to see the references. Try that with the item called “Susan,” which you can see has 6 references.
26. This opens up Susan’s interview transcript. You can use this to help find references that you might want to code.
27. Go to the View menu, and click on Close to go back to the query results.
28. Above the results you will see the Reference tab. You can click on the Reference tab to see all of the references together in one page.
29. Click on the final tab, Word Tree, which shows you what words often come before and after the term or phrase you searched for. This is useful to understand how that word or phrase is being used.
30. You can click on the drop-down arrow under family to toggle between “family” and “families.”
31. We can save the results of this query, by clicking on Save Results… at the top right.
32. You will notice at the top of the pop-up window you will see that this is not just going to save the results, but also create a new node, and code the results based on that node, with the node called what we name the query results. This node only lives in the Query Results folder, but you can copy it and add it to your nodes list if you want to use it for more coding. Generally, this will save all the search results in the Search section from the left menu, in the Query Results folder, although we can always create folders and organize our query results further if we wanted. Also note that these results are just a snapshot and don’t dynamically change if the project items change. Let’s save our results. Call it “Family” and click on Save Results.
33. Close any windows open using the View menu. Then using the left menu, under Search, go to the Query Results folder. You will see the Family query results saved, and you can double click on it to view the results again. Unfortunately, the Word Tree won’t be saved here.
Test Your Understanding 1
Using the Query menu run a Word Frequency query for the project to find the top 50 words, including stemmed words. Only search News Articles. What was the most common word?
Next run a Text query for the project to find the phrase “climate change” in all project items. How many project items were in the results?
Click here for the answers.
Coding Queries
1. Okay, now let’s move on. Close any query results tabs that you have open using the View menu.
2. The next few queries I am going to show you are better to use when you have done some coding, as they can help you gain insight from all your work coding your content. For example, you could use these to find potential connections between themes, or connections between a theme and a certain demographic.
3. Let’s start with Coding queries. You can use these to find all content coded at selected nodes, a combination of nodes, or a combination of nodes and attributes. So for example, let’s say you want to see if there is content coded as both “Memorable quotes” and “Real estate development,” and you only want to see references that are from residents of Marshallberg – you can do this with a Coding query. Select Coding from the Query menu.
4. We can keep the defaults for now, which only finds references that are coded with all the codes listed. So we just need to click on the arrow next to no selected nodes to select the two codes we want: “Memorable quotes” and “Real estate development.” Put checkmarks next to both of these codes, and then click on Select.
5. Then click on Run Query to see the results.
6. You are shown all the results, but you can also click on the Summary tab just above the results to see how many results you got. We can see there are a few results in interviews and survey responses.
7. But we can narrow this down further, to just quotes from residents of Marshallberg. To do that, we can click on the plus sign at the top right to add another parameter to our search.
8. For this new row, we use the drop-down menu to select Any case where.
9. Next click on the arrow next to no selected attribute.
10. Then expand Person, select Township, and click Select Attribute.
11. From the far blank right drop-down, select “Marshallberg.” So the query says “All” at the top left, meaning all of these conditions must be true. Then one line says that the content must be coded with both of the nodes, Memorable quotes and Real estate development, and then the other line says AND the person who said this must be from Marshallberg.
12. Click on Run Query again. This time you can see we get just one large memorable quote on real estate from Mary and James, who are from Marshallberg.
13. We might not want to save the results, but we might want to save this query to re-run again in the future as we continue to code. To do that, click on Save Query… at the top right.
14. Give it the name “Marshallberg Quotes on Real Estate” and click on Save Query. Then close the query results tab using the View menu.
15. This query is now saved in the Search section on the left, under Queries. You can double click on it at any time to re-open the settings for the query and to then re-run it.
Test Your Understanding 2
Run a Coding query for the project to find interview content only coded as “Infrastructure,” “Policy, management,” OR “Real estate development” where the interviewees are from Harkers Island. How many references did you find?
(Hint: You will have to change an option to say Any instead of All to satisfy the “or” condition, different than in the demonstration.)
Click here for the answers.
Matrix Coding and Crosstab Queries
1. Next up are Matrix Coding queries. These allow you to see coding intersections between two lists of items. For example, let’s say you want to see which interviewees by cases had the most positive and negative attitudes based on coding - you can do this with a Matrix Coding query. Select Matrix Coding from the Query menu.
2. This query is formed using drag and drop. First, using the left menu, under Cases, go to People, and then expand Interview Participants.
3. Highlight all of the interviewees by clicking on the first one, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking on the last one. Then drag and drop them on the left side of the matrix query under Rows.
4. Then, using the left menu, under Codes, click on Nodes, and then go to Attitude and expand it.
5. Highlight all the attitude nodes (similar to the cases) and then drag and drop them on the right side of the matrix query under Columns.
6. Click on Run Query to see the results. You will see a grid or matrix with the number of references where those nodes and cases intersect.
7. To see the results more clearly and point out interesting patterns, go to the View menu, and from the Node Matrix drop-down menu, select Blue-White Shading.
8. We can see that the darker the colour, the more two items intersect. In this case, we can see for example that Barbara had strong positive and negative references, Thomas’s interview was more negative than positive, and William’s was only positive.
9. Once you have finished examining the results, close the query results tab using the View menu.
10. Let’s move on to the last query we will look at today, Crosstab queries. Crosstab queries are similar to Matrix Coding queries, but you can expand out all the categories for an attribute along the columns automatically. For example, you could determine which themes were discussed most by Township of respondent. Select Crosstab from the Query menu.
11. This query is partially formed using drag and drop. First, using the left menu, under Codes, go to Nodes. Highlight all the top-level nodes (make sure none of the Node categories are expanded) and then drag and drop them under Nodes on the Crosstab query tab.
12. The default option for the Crosstab is codes against attributes. Under Classification, select Person from the drop-down menu.
13. Under Attributes, select Township from the drop-down menu. This Crosstab query will create a matrix where the codes are along the rows, and for the columns, it will take all the values of one attribute (in this case, Township) and use those for the column headers. Then it will tally where they intersect.
14. Click on Run Query at the top to see the results (might have to scroll up to the top of that window to see the button). You will see a matrix with the number of references where those nodes and attributes intersect.
15. To see the results more clearly and point out interesting patterns, click on the Results tab above where you specified the parameters of the query. Under Heatmap, select the top left option going from green to white.
16. We can now see that the darker the green, the more two items intersect in our grid now.
17. In this Results tab, at the top, you’ll see a section called Show Results As. You can change the selection, to alter what numbers are displayed in the grid. In this case, try selecting Coding Presence. Often times you might not have a big enough data set to gain meaning from the numerical values for coding references, for example, but you can at least see where there is an intersection at all or not. For example, we see that the themes of a “Attitude” and “Sense of Community” aren’t connected to any of the townships. Normally people don’t report these numbers, but use them to gain insight into their project.
18. You’ll see that NVivo also offers Coding Comparison Queries, which are used when working on a team to see how much agreement there is between team members on coding. I encourage you to play around with this query and all of the other queries we’ve already discussed on your own time to learn more.
Test Your Understanding 3
Run a Matrix Coding query on social media content only, where the columns are the attitude child nodes (positive, negative, etc.) and the rows are the remaining top-level nodes (Balance, Economy, etc). What two nodes have the most negative references?
Next run a Crosstab query, where the rows are the top-level nodes (Balance, Economy, etc) and the Person attribute is Education Level. What node was coded the most by coding references for people whose highest level of education completed is undergraduate college?
Click here for the answers.
Export Data
1. You can export your nodes as a list or its references. To export your full list of nodes, first open up your Nodes list and select at least one node. Go to the Data menu and select Codebook.
2.You can keep the defaults to include all nodes and click on Select. This will save your all of your nodes in a document that includes a description, the number of files coded with that node, and the number of references.
3. Browse to your workshop folder, name your file or keep the default, decide if you want it as a document or spreadsheet format, and then click on OK.
4. You can also export all the references for a particular set of nodes. To do this, first select your subset of nodes. For example, select Balance and Community Change (hold down the Command key to select more than one item).
5. Then go to the Data menu and select Items.
6. It will ask you where to save the files, so browse to your workshop folder. It will create a document for each node that contains a list of each reference, similar to what you would see if you double clicked on the node. Open up all the files you have exported to see their contents, if they don’t open automatically.
And that's it!
Resources to Learn More
Visit our Getting Started page for more information, tutorials, and workshops on NVivo 12!
Qualitative Research Methods
Qualitative Data Analysis and Coding
NVivo
Related Information
Introduction to OCR and Searchable PDFs: Adobe Acrobat Pro
Test your Understanding Answers
- The most common word is variations of the word oyster. It appears through the news articles 26 times.
- A Text query for the project to find the phrase “climate change” in all project items has 5 project items.
- Back to the next section.
Test Your Understanding 2:
- There are 15 references total. Robert’s interview has 6, Susan’s has 4, and Thomas’ has 5.
- Back to the next section.
Test Your Understanding 3:
- The Natural Environment Node has the most negative references with 33.
- The nodes coded the most by coding references for people whose highest level of education completed is undergraduate college is Real Estate Development, with 51 references.
- Back to the next section.