Data analysis & using NVivo

Third year student, Linda Wilks, presented on the role of habitus in festivals. That was interesting but of greater relevance and use to us students was her explanation of how she analysed her qualitative data. Here's what:

Recording the interviews

• Assess background noise
• Put your recorder on something soft

One of my colleagues had problems transcribing an important word when the interviewee spoke as he put his coffee mug down.

Transcription

• Use a foot pedal
  
• Contract some of it out but expect to have to check it thoroughly yourself too. Cost is £11 per hour of their time.
• Takes approx 7 hours to do 45 minutes

I thought this useful & practical. But it got more useful because she talked about organising the data to make it manageable by:

1. Designing a data classification system
• Based on research theory
• Related to interview questions
• Be prepared to modify it
• Transfer into NVivo under ‘tree nodes’
  


2. Import your transcripts into NVivo
• Highlight sections of the transcript and drag into the appropriate tree node


3. Export the tree node contents
• Make sure you tell NVivo to include the folder and hierarchical name
  

She gave us a screen dump of NVivo with nodes and folders and hierarchies. She explained with examples of sources and numbers of references in the nodes, and an analysed transcript.

• To get an idea of the important areas, assess how many references a node has.
• Print out tree nodes for analysis.

For the second level of analysis, she used Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and justified the use in relation to her work.

She had a check list to scribble on her texts, for example what styles, types of statement, intertextuality and transferred the notes to a spreadsheet.

The final step is to write up findings, without reference to theory at this stage and no language that precludes conclusions.

What I've noted above is all Linda's work, and if you want to know the detail you should contact her. I'm going to get NVivo and practise on my MRes data, and I'm going to look up Fairclough.