NVivo 2.0 and ATLAS.ti 5.0: A Comparative
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1. NOTE Employing the same interface as the Document Explorer the Node Explorer offers a node centered perspective of the project documents The leftmost panel shows the free tree and case nodes that have been created in the study The number in parentheses is the number of nodes assigned to a given nodal category The rightmost panel shows a list of the free nodes in the pro ject the number of document passages to which each node has been coded and other details spe cific to each node ment directly NVivo also turned away two additional text files because according to the NVivo error message both contained an embedded object that can not sic be imported On inspection both files proved to contain only text On a hunch I opened and saved the problem rtf format files in Sun s StarOffice 6 0 which is often good at stripping away Microsoft arti facts from HTML files and tried importing the files into NVivo again It worked this time ATLAS ti 5 0 imported the same two files without a mur mur of concern which makes me think that there is either a glitch in NVivo s implementation of the rtf format specifications or these specifications have changed a little since 2002 when NVivo 2 0 was released NVivo and ATLAS ti are strikingly different in how they handle nontext data NVivo s approach is to enable the researcher to work indirectly with tables pictures sounds video or HTML files Its manual recommends that users2. NOT AND Fortifications NOTE iv amp Storage Facilities 4 A 3 Codes m Chitredurga amp NOT Fortifications amp NOT 4 artilery 258 4 Storage Fa ilties 3 Bastions 269 4 2 Brtish 0 2 84 E Briish Garrison Bldg 1 6 z G 2 Chitradurga 43 10 roe ty Gre mud granary 1 3 B Circular masonry granary 4 x 5 3 Greulor mud granary 10 5 Appendix to the Report on the amp 5 3 Ditch 101 0 E320 Appendix to the Report on the 3 Gates 302 4 fS 20 Appendix to the Report on the i E E20 Account of Ordnance Stores in G Oknin Fa EAn FhitHedman 22d Sentemher a c gt 4 gt wee in lines 1 4 Refresh Codes Scope Help Resuk 35 Te P 1 008_5 P6 Z NOTE The query tool is one of ATLAS ti s many strengths but not however one that has intu itive appeal Plan on spending a few minutes working with the tool before you feel comfortable using it Assay Tool tables These two way frequency tables can be generated as text files or as tab semicolon or comma delimited files The latter are easily imported into Microsoft Excel and most statistical data analysis software packages ATLAS ti has no direct counterpart of NVivo s profile table feature Creating Networks As stated earlier ATLAS ti s tools for creating and displaying network views of data are comparable to their counterparts in NVivo Figure 9 shows a network of the historical and functional relat
3. cart ites ple Tag aa TE 04 TN Menem Prete Ri EY xT re n na NOTE Passages of the primary document open in the left window have been assigned codes each of which are indicated by a code label and a vertical bar spanning the passage in the right panel of the display mented in memos or graphically displayed as networks of relationships These main parts of ATLAS ti work well and are largely unchanged from ATLAS ti 4 Most project activity begins and ends with ATLAS ti s main screen see Figure 6 The active primary document is displayed in the leftmost window To the right of the primary document window is the margin area in which one displays codes or other objects created by the analyst and associated with selected portions of the primary document The four drop down lists across the top of the display above the primary document and margin windows are from left to right the primary document quotation code and memo drop down lists To open an existing primary document you simply click on the primary document drop down list to unroll it and then click on the document you want to browse quotations codes and memos are accessed in the same Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 454 FIELD METHODS way from their respective drop down lists The topmost row of buttons per forms major program functions while the column of buttons that runs down the left side of the screen activates particular f
4. identify the documents written by adult females Boolean expressions e g identify the passages in which granaries are mentioned but not powder magazines and proximity searches e g identify the passages in which the strings cannon or can nons are in the same paragraph as fortification walls and expense maga zine and contained in a document written by Colin Mackenzie Sets can be used to efficiently define the scope of searches As with other kinds of searches the results are returned as new or existing nodes As coding progresses the Show and Assay tools and profile tables become useful The Show Tool which is accessed from the Project Pad or by right clicking on an item in one of the Explorer windows gives details about the nodes and documents that relate to the selected document or node The Assay Tool operates on documents or nodes and is used to create two way tables each cell of which displays the count or frequency with which the compared items are coded on the selected documents or nodes Profile tables are superficially similar to assay tables but are based on counts of char acters or text passages that have been coded on nodes documents or by the values of a selected attribute Assay and profile tables can be exported as tab separated text files and SPSS dat format files Creating Models NVivo and ATLAS ti have largely converged in how they handle the interpretive networks or models that may em
5. w Ig 4a se AMPA ey riw Byes en 4 pew Ewa sep i a D a i z i BBC ces we mad earar Cicer eet granny A B craw rat powy ekde Poa PE An MLPA IA ATE ans just labels they are not attached to primary documents although they can be at any later time ATLAS ti s automatic coding feature is helpful for coding concepts that can be described by a search expression For example the Chitradurga code in Figure 6 was assigned to all passages in the primary documents that include some mention of Chitradurga Chittledroog or Chittaldrug all of which are variations of the same name using a search expression to scan each document a process that took only a few seconds Like its counterpart in NVivo you can easily set the scope of passages to be autocoded e g word paragraph and so on but ATLAS ti does not have a direct counterpart to NVivo s Section Coder Codes also can be grouped into families e g the code family Fortifica tions in the test HU includes the bastions ditches glacis gates magazines and walls codes The main advantage of a code family is that you can use it like any other code to design elaborate queries of the data set or use them as network nodes in modeling ATLAS ti includes a well designed Code Fam Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 457 ily Manager tool to facilitate the process of creating and managing code fami lies and
6. languages Kannada scans from left to right 11 To do the conversion I used Rad Video Tools a set of shareware video and audio tools that can be downloaded from http www radgametools com This is not the only fix If you expe rience this or other audio or video file access problems in ATLAS ti and if you are comfortable making changes to your system registry you can also work through the instructions given at http www atlasti com mcisetup shtml to change the registry so ATLAS ti can access these files REFERENCES Bazeley P and L Richards 2000 The NVivo qualitative project book London Sage Gibbs G 2002 Qualitative data analysis Explorations with NVivo London Open University Press Harold E R and W S Means 2002 XML in a nutshell A desktop quick reference 2nd ed Sebastopol CA O Reilly Jeffrey E F F 2002 Mastering regular expressions 2nd ed Sebastopol CA O Reilly Lewis R B 1998 ATLAS ti and NUDIST A comparative review of two leading qualitative data analysis packages Cultural Anthropology Methods 10 41 47 Morse J and L Richards 2002 Readme first for a user s guide to qualitative methods Thou sand Oaks CA Sage Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 464 FIELD METHODS Richards L 2002a Getting started in NVivo Melbourne Australia QSR International 2002b Using Nvivo in qualitative research Melbourne Australia QSR Internationa
7. mouse clicks and some thought given to what you are doing If your data are rtf format text files with style sheet delimited sections e g sections for interview questions and interviewee responses NVivo s Section Coder can be used to code automat ically each section whether by the order in which each section occurs in the Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 448 FIELD METHODS text or by each unique heading It is a useful feature especially for interview based projects and one for which there is no direct counterpart in ATLAS ti Searches and Assays Like its forerunner NUDeIST NVivo excels at searching and the use of searches for autocoding patterns in texts Figure 4 shows a simple example in the Search Tool window that uses wildcards to search for words and parts of words that contain the string gate The search criteria are set to examine all documents for this string and to assign paragraphs within which the string occurs to the node Gateways Although I created a free node called Gate ways before performing this search I could have created it on the fly within the search specification or merged the result of this search with existing pas sages that had been coded against Gateways More complex searches are as easy to specify and perform as the simple ones You can search nodes e g identify the document sections that have been coded for Dhoondia life attributes e g
8. offers excel lent tools for coding and gives users a great deal of flexibility in how this is accomplished Coding can be done manually by reading the text and assign ing nodes to selected passages or it can be done automatically by construct ing searches and then saving the results as new nodes NVivo recognizes three basic types of nodes free nodes or codes or con cepts that have not been formally related to other codes in the project tree nodes or groups of nodes that have been organized into a formal hierarchical relationship and case nodes or codes that organize information about the individual cases or units of analysis in the database The Node Explorer see Figure 3 is NVivo s main tool for accessing the project database from a node centered perspective From it one can essentially undertake the same analytical tasks that one can do from the Document Explorer see Figure 2 Gone for the most part is NUDeIST s obsessive emphasis on the sequences of numbers that indicated the position of each branch of a tree node a peculiarity that I complained about in my previous review Lewis 1998 While such number sequences are still around in NVivo 2 0 recog nizable as the sets of numbers in parentheses before node titles in many node displays you no longer have to pay much attention to them in coding which is no small blessing in my view Nodes can be created moved about orga nized into sets or merged with no more than a few
9. products and useful tools for QDA researchers The learning curves for these packages also are similar ATLAS ti is clearly the more versatile of the two but it may hold its lead only briefly The current production version of NVivo was released in 2002 and it is reasonable to assume that QSR International has its own plans for a new Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 461 and improved NVivo in the next year or two Until then there is little about ATLAS ti not to like it is an excellent general purpose QDA package NVivo 2 0 strikes me as a good choice for interviews and other text based research but once the data move beyond relatively straightforward texts I would turn to ATLAS ti because it can import display code and analyze such a wide range of qualitative data types As always what works for me may not be the answer for you so down load demo versions of both products from their respective Web pages see the appendix for the addresses and try them out before making your final decision If you are a new user of such programs you would be ill advised to install one of these packages right out of the box and jump right into your study They are too complex Plan on spending at least a few days to a week to become familiar with the package you choose before expecting to apply it even clumsily in research And be grateful you are not doing this kind of research back in the days when
10. sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 452 FIELD METHODS what its title suggests It is an exhaustive well written guide to ATLAS ti s capabilities which also includes considerable helpful advice for users upgrading from ATLAS ti 4 Unlike the Using NVivo manual the ATLAS ti User s Guide and Reference does not attempt to teach the basics of qualita tive data analysis at the same time The CD ROM version of ATLAS ti 5 0 which will be available by the time this review appears in print will include several online movies that guide the beginning user through the basic features of the ATLAS ti 4 2 ver sion of the program I was skeptical of this approach when I first encountered it with ATLAS ti 4 1 but after trying it I realized that it can be quite effec tive An online version of the tutorial updated for version 5 0 is planned If the manuals the help file or the tutorials are not enough there is always the ATLAS ti home page at http www atlasti com which has links to many excellent examples of the program s capabilities and the ATLAS ti mailing list send the message SUB ATLAS TI first_name last_name your_institu tion to listserv atlasti de Inputting and Managing Data One of the most impressive strengths of ATLAS ti 5 0 is the range of data file types that you can import and work with directly Your primary docu ments are in Chinese or Hebrew characters No problem As with NVivo the text does not hav
11. save tables audio pictures and any other nontextual data as separate files in their respective formats and then include them in a project s database as proxy files or DataBites both of which enable the user to access the Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 446 FIELD METHODS external data by opening it in the application that created it For example let us say I have a set of photographs of mud brick granaries that I want to include in my NVivo database It is impossible to view or code these pictures directly in NVivo but I can make a proxy file for each picture which creates a text document in the database and links it to the photo I can then add the salient information including relevant coding about each picture in the proxy document A company representative reports that NVivo s indirect approach for working with nontext qualitative data works well for many users I see it more as a product shortcoming that significantly narrows the field of poten tial NVivo applications and I recommend that prospective NVivo users give careful thought to their need for these capabilities Coding Nodes The large tabs at the top of the Project Pad see Figure 1 identify docu ments and nodes NVivo s two main working frameworks Both documents and nodes can be created explored or browsed The Document and Node Explorers see Figures 2 and 3 mimic the logic and interface of Microsoft Windo
12. ESSAYS 453 FIGURE 6 ATLAS ti Main Screen icia he buk Lumis Quidme caka Haris fates Wee lub zue Wise Ai H Oi alle th e A e y 4 zn vanf Pa op reas Of TABUI Uwe T rsss Ssa nea Uke iae Efe ers Mara Pfi F The weeks gece thii rem td bad k bells owni coe nae de at sedy D ofthese Sisner parse tne when ny one our Teemise te Town and Fa og o anc upen th whole thes werks and those imenced mors imexecintely Box the defenes of we pasces woudl vecder the mn uccomdormsble shratio foe an snecy even Fhe S ild be ave te ger peceeccion ff E 2 o a ne Toon te waole enzy 193 ponte lys e Domcittes are of piion tat TUTIRA SELADA T sie oped MII ARED ded benoae A yet ecws gga thes Raala n ara ea a a ayy Aue TE tho aR pA tne AMA ee ge Rea elah dane me grs int nth 4 ateta Gavermet v Thi merminin wrth Or Winks der prial Gord wed pemiencabte fin Orkana 99 eyano bat be owe ardane en the Ail wed ee aurar be bediau an Bl i A teens regar te de eeurnareaten ai ka Pages okne amp orignal ne fe ay hon n Wiis Apps nnd Nee 1 the Sore ares as hs al de meber aluan na ney E neh wok and dppedy Ne Zis an darrar of the canner eigubed Por the whol J u s r Ar asom ofthe ont ond AM at y onceng seins oe thi Hit i er wad Bos ninsa to phi the ardran nee den Bs the pper w odka on the abaa Sns pan sdz s r fadni PT Press Innes a oh Mrara Poste a
13. Publications on April 20 2015 444 FIELD METHODS FIGURE 2 NVivo Document Explorer 5G Document Explorer Mysore Test Data Set Tools Mew E Y P Propertes Attioutes EdtSet Asay Search Contents of Al Documente Nane Nodfied a S 7607 Reade 97 3 1 ilse 110 200 By t76_n7_28 Reade 51 10 2004 14s 4140 2004 A Cotradurga Pobgers t79 _22_co_Pian of GD Sevsore Pobgss E 1000 00 00 jst C 3 35 Mysore Survey 1820_05_28_Dhoon IOR 11s 1 10 2004 3 RB Read Repert t300_05 26 Mackt 157 1 10 AHO A Heyre Report i2c0_03_10_xafiya 9515 i Ls MION fi vete_03_CO_Mecks 193 O 1 AOAN y g gt NOTE Using this well designed Windows Explorer like interface you can create search clas sify and analyze project documents easily The leftmost panel of the Explorer window shows the documents and document sets that have been incorporated into the study The rightmost window shows the title and other basic characteristics of each document rtf text files The rich text capability is a real plus What it means is that if for example you are working with a set of transcribed interviews that have been formatted nicely in a word processing package that can also save its files in rtf format you can import them easily into NVivo and have the result look like it does in the word processing software that created it There is however far more at issue here than pretty formatti
14. REVIEW ESSAYS NVivo 2 0 and ATLAS ti 5 0 A Comparative Review of Two Popular Qualitative Data Analysis Programs ATLAS ti 5 0 developed by Scientific Software Development Thousand Oaks London Sage 2004 NVivo 2 0 developed by Qualitative Solutions amp Research Thousand Oaks London Sage 2002 DOI 10 1177 1525822X04269174 ATLAS ti 5 0 and NVivo 2 0 are among the best available and potentially most useful qualitative data analysis QDA tools Both products enable the researcher to associate codes or labels with chunks of text sounds pictures or video to search these codes for patterns and to construct classifications of codes that reflect testable models of the conceptual structure of the underly ing data Both are tremendously flexible programs that can be readily applied in a wide range of applications Both also are Microsoft Windows based products neither program is available for the Mac OS This review examines the latest versions of these products My remarks are aimed at prospective new users who need to decide which product may be best suited for the research tasks they have in mind To a certain extent this examination also revisits my comparative review Lewis 1998 of ATLAS ti 4 0 and NUDSIST 4 0 the latter of which can be viewed as the forerunner of NVivo One thing I did not like about NUDsIST 4 0 and ATLAS ti 4 0 Lewis 1998 was that they only worked directly with a limited range of data file types Both p
15. am Although I used codes for the network nodes in Figure 9 quotations graphics sounds or primary documents would have served equally as well Other Features Space limitations do not permit more than passing mention of a few other interesting ATLAS ti features First there is the Word Cruncher which can be accessed from the Tools item in the menu bar Word Cruncher performs a basic content analysis task which is word frequency display We could ask for example about the extent to which the transportation of siege stores fig ured in the reports on the Mysore forts Short of reading and coding more Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 460 FIELD METHODS than twenty reports one quick measure would be to examine the frequency with which the authors of the reports mentioned bullocks and carts the main means by which stores were conveyed in Mysore at that time Word Cruncher shows us that among the 12 005 discrete words in these reports there are seventeen references to bullocks and six mentions of carts and vari ations of both words all but one of these mentions are contained in the two formal reports made by the fortifications review committees which certainly suggests that they were concerned about the army s ability to provision the forts under review The next step would presumably be carefully to read these two reports and also examine the orders given to the officers who were charged with c
16. an semantic and proximity operators used to delimit a query The upper right hand pane dis plays an example query a search for all quotations in which there is some mention of Chitradurga but nothing that has to do with fortifications or stor age facilities both of the latter are code families which can be thought of as sets of associated codes within five lines The lower right hand pane dis plays a scrollable list of the hits generated by this query Left click on a hit and the main HU screen displays the appropriate primary document at the target passage The results can also be saved to a file as a report or printed Code queries can be stored as super codes which also are displayed in the drop down code list Unlike a simple code super codes are queries not links to particular text passages In practical terms this means you can use super codes and queries constructed from nested super codes as a framework within which to construct complex queries Two way frequency tables that show counts of assigned codes by primary documents can be constructed using ATLAS ti s cumbersomely named Codes Primary Documents Table feature which is analogous to NVivo s Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 458 FIELD METHODS FIGURE 8 ATLAS ti s Query Tool iojxi Families Query Els P Recac undo _Redo Y Fovtifications 6 ANDX Chitradurga
17. ant to the study but that could not be accessed or coded by direct means in the software ATLAS ti 4 was superior in this area because users could also input and code WAV format sound files and several types of graphics and video files Now in 2004 the data handling capabilities of NVivo 2 0 and ATLAS ti 5 0 are significantly improved To test these programs I threw at them a complex data set Pulled together from one of my current research projects an ethnohistorical study of small Mysore kingdoms in South India the test data comprised 8MB of letters memoranda and reports written between 1798 and 1805 which were transcribed from the original manu scripts and saved as rich text or rtf format files five photographs saved as jpg format files two HTML files one a simple one with no more than for matted text the other a more complex Web page with twelve embedded jpg format graphics and just to make things harder an mp3 format sound file and a movy format video file The text documents alone would be challeng ing for any QDA software they are transcriptions of handwritten documents and contain marginalia and other comments about changes in the hand of the writer erasures strikeovers even notes about the quality and watermark of the paper on which the writer wrote Many of these documents also contain tables a few of which are quite complex and most if not all of them contain footnotes The following sections examine the maj
18. ary description in several Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 443 FIGURE NVivo Project Pad N NVivo My Project Project Tools Documents Nodes Analysis Windows Help Documents Create a Document Explore Documents Browse a Document Wj Show project pad when opening a project NOTE The Project Pad is the default interface for accessing NVivo s main functions From it you can create explore or browse documents or nodes and create or explore the document or node sets or their attributes convenient ways and a password can be assigned to control access to the database Just do not forget the password or your NVivo project is toast because there is no backdoor by which it can be retrieved i e write down the password and keep it in a safe place Once you have created or chosen a project you are presented with NVivo s default main screen the Project Pad see Figure 1 which organizes NVivo s most common tasks into a series of button panels Advanced NVivo users will probably want to turn off the Project Pad and work from the alter native main interface which retains the menu bar of the Project Pad and adds floating document and node browsers see Figures 2 and 3 What kind of qualitative data can NVivo 2 0 handle One can easily import or create ASCII or ANSI text i e plain text and rich text format Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE
19. asiest of which is simply to drag them from an Explorer window to the Model Explorer Once added relationships are signified by adding links between elements For example I added links to show that cir cular mud rectangular mud and rectangular masonry are types of stor age facilities see Figure 5 Interpretive text tags that visually illustrate this Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 451 relationship can be added to the link lines by right clicking on each line and typing the label text in the link line properties window Model elements can be grouped style formats can be created and applied you can even create separate model representations of a data set as discrete layers which is a handy feature when you want to consider different interpretations of the same data And as you might expect you can browse or code nodes and show documents coded at nodes and memos by simply right clicking on a model element and choosing the action you wish NVivo to perform In sum NVivo 2 0 offers researchers an easy to use flexible environ ment within which to organize classify code and search for patterns in tex tual data The interface and data handling capabilities are much improved over NUD IST NVivo 2 0 is an excellent choice of QDA software for inter views and other text based projects Its greatest weakness is its inability to import code and search nontext data by
20. but by no means all of the cultural features present in this area have been assigned codes The logic of coding graphical objects is the same as that applied to text The numbered rectangles in the leftmost panel are the graphical equivalent of coded text passages The vertical bars and the labels in the rightmost panel correspond to each of the coded graphi cal passages And yes the margin pane can get cluttered when many codes are assigned to a short passage span whether it be text graphics or other objects and ATLAS ti users can make many modifications to the code dis play panel by simply right clicking on that part of the screen and then choos ing how they want the display to look Coding in ATLAS ti is not all that different from NVivo Codes can be assigned to selected portions of primary documents manually either by open coding in which you type a word or phrase to become a new code associated with the passage by code by list in which you select one or more existing codes from a pop up list code in vivo in which you enable a word or phrase from a selected text passage to create itself as a new code and by sim ple drag and drop procedures ATLAS ti s free codes are effectively Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 456 FIELD METHODS FIGURE 7 ATLAS ti Main Screen Showing a Coded Graphical Primary Document is arate Bexha isa Moe oreo oro Dho Hee
21. direct means in a project database this cannot help but limit its utility as a general purpose QDA tool ATLAS TI 5 0 In my earlier review Lewis 1998 ATLAS ti emerged as the clear winner in the overall product comparison ATLAS ti 5 0 which was released June 15 2004 builds on this success Thomas Muhr and the Scientific Software Development team worked hard to produce a program that could be the new standard against which such products are measured Although NVivo 2 0 is tough competition in some areas ATLAS ti 5 0 is an outstanding product Setting Up The recommended system configuration to run ATLAS ti 5 0 is a Pentium AMD 900 MHz or greater machine with Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP 256 MB or more RAM and 45 MB hard drive space The minimum configuration is a Pentium AMD 133 MHz machine with Microsoft Win dows 98SE 64 MB RAM and 25 MB of available hard disk space Packag ing information for the new ATLAS ti 5 0 was not yet available when this review was prepared ATLAS ti 5 0 ships with two excellent manuals that meet the same high standards as the software application itself Like its NVivo counterpart the thirty page Quick Tour for Beginners manual provides the basic training that most users will need to turn to first With it in hand the new user will be quickly oriented to the program s basic features and how to use them The much heftier User s Guide and Reference 417 pages manual delivers just Downloaded from fmx
22. e to be in transliterated into Roman characters and it does not have to scan from left to right Pining away to code 3 000 sound bites from the evening news or hundreds of photographs of traffic accident scenes No problem here either ATLAS ti 5 0 imports Microsoft Word and Works Windows Write and WordPerfect files along with ASCH or ANSI text files and files saved as rtf format Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1 2 3 spreadsheets Microsoft PowerPoint HTML sound files au snd mp3 wav for mats video files avi mpg mov qt wmv and many graphics file formats the list of importable file formats depends on the Media Control Interface drivers installed on your computer These capabilities alone make ATLAS ti warrant serious attention by every QDA researcher When you start the ATLAS ti application you are presented with the con cept of a Hermeneutic Unit perhaps the most unintuitive concept in the entire program Hermeneutic Unit HU is Scientific Software Development jargon for project or database Regardless of what you call it the HU contains all the primary documents texts graphics HTML videos or sound files for a given project Within each primary document the analyst can select specific quotations and assign codes the latter of which can be grouped into families Quotations and coded objects can be further docu Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW
23. eatures associated with the dis play coding and analysis of project documents I tested the ease of data input in ATLAS ti by importing the same Mysore test data set that I used for NVivo Although ATLAS ti can import Microsoft Word files in their native doc format I elected to import them as rtf format files because the latter can be edited in ATLAS ti The program imported the test files without so much as a murmur of complaint In general the rtf format text files were imported with better results than the same files in NVivo but neither program can handle footnotes Unlike NVivo ATLAS ti imported rtf format files containing a mix of text tables and photos with a high degree of success It also imported Microsoft Excel spreadsheets sev eral jpg format photos HTML files and an mp3 format rap tune called Welcome to India without a hitch It would be astounding if ATLAS ti could import such a diverse collection of file types without any problems bubbling to the surface and sure enough there were a few One consistent problem was ATLAS ti s inability to wordwrap long strings of text in the cells of imported tables According to the ATLAS ti 5 0 readme file that describes the product s main features the way a document displays in Microsoft WordPad is generally what you should expect to see in ATLAS ti Sure enough WordPad has the same wordwrapping problem with long strings in table cells so ATLAS ti must be forgiven o
24. eement bears looking into since product support will otherwise be limited Depending on when your NVivo box was printed you many find that QSR International gives conflicting information about the minimum specifi cations for NVivo 2 0 The outside of the box I received for this review states that the minimum system platform is Microsoft Windows 98 with 32MB RAM and 50MB of hard disk space The company s Web site however makes no mention of Windows 98 and gives the minimum as Microsoft Win dows ME with 64MB RAM and 40 125MB of hard disk space When asked about this discrepancy a company representative noted that while NVivo 2 0 will run on Windows 98 QSR no longer provides support for their prod uct on this operating system The same representative also pointed me to a helpful Web page in the product FAQ that details the currently supported operating systems and configurations http www qsrinternational com support faq FAQ Platform htm The boxes currently shipping with the product no longer mention Windows 98 The NVivo manuals both of which were written by Lyn Richards a cofounder of QSR International support the product well The fifty two page Getting Started in NVivo Richards 2002a is the obvious place for a new user to start It offers the reader a twelve step guide to NVivo s main fea tures and does a very good job of it The other manual titled Using NVivo in Qualitative Research Richards 2002b follows the same twelve
25. erge from the analysis of a set of documents The hierarchical network bias that dominated NUDeIST 4 0 Lewis 1998 has also been lessened The Model Explorer see Figure 5 pro Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 449 FIGURE 4 NVivo Search Tool Search Tool Find Single Item Text Node Attribute Value Or combination of Items Boolean Proximity Curent Search Operation Find Test gate In this Scope N Document Set Al Documents New Doc Scope 7 Node Set New Node Scope Assay Scope Save Scope as Node And Spread Finds In a scope Document to E Enclosing paragraphs In a scope Node to i Inspect each find as it is made Run Search NOTE Autocoding by searches is well organized in NVivo The three part Search Tool enables the user to specify the search target with great precision and imprecision in the case of fuzzy searches define the scope within which to limit the searches and how much context to capture with each search hit The figure shows a search for the text string gate using a wildcard search which in this case returned passages that contained gate gates gateway gateways and Voocharanaugatecara among other words that contain the target string within a scope of all the documents in the project and with search hits spread to include the paragraph that con
26. hyperlinks and even networks can be created on the fly and associated with elements of the text as small as individual letters words phrases and sentences right up to the HU itself Figure 6 shows a simple example of codes assigned to passages in one of the test documents The second paragraph in Figure 6 expresses an early nineteenth century fortifications review committee s view of the state of the defensive works at a hill fort called Chitradurga in South India To illustrate my point that ATLAS ti is capable of working with diverse scripts the com mittee s recommendation has been rendered in Kannada script a Dravidian language of South India In the rightmost panel the vertical bar spans this passage and is labeled with the word Chitradurga which is a code I created and assigned to all references to Chitradurga in the test document set These code labels are in the Roman alphabet but ATLAS ti 5 0 also enables the user to change the labels to other scripts easily That you can have multiple codes associated with the same text segment is shown by the codes Gates and Walls which is associated with the passage that begins at the bottom of the leftmost panel of the display in Figure 6 Figure 7 takes the example a little further and demonstrates that not only can ATLAS ti import nontext files but you can actually code them directly too The photograph in Figure 7 depicts part of the citadel area of Chitradurga Many
27. ionships between some of the test data codes all centered on their relationship with Chitradurga It was cre ated with a few clicks in ATLAS ti s Network Editor The left half of the Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 459 FIGURE 9 ATLAS ti s Network View Network View ont Chitradurga a O x Mabiok binder r s Lepat Deps Seetss Heo vja E WORE MHI AL A Be Oak n pet p RE araby fg as pn poets of S wo i Pai a iz azsodaied vh y ta Pa i Pa ni 5 A f Pa an i X a f a _ i L 4 P A d Ua f P IO Beecdsdakh is assocteting wath ipata traks eoerazee AN f a d wo ae f A we eerceedealscth 7 s esscoshes Ma 4 a gt J A N 7 A ON fo H Pai P P Cakes is sezoeistad s th EQ Sr sh Serian Hajj q _ t cause c a ccerertiicry LEBAH uote click oe conser meru NOTE Constructing and displaying conceptual networks are easily done in ATLAS ti graphic are features of Chitradurga s built environment all of which are spa tially associated with each other One building stands out because it is one of the few identifiable Chitradurga structures built during the British period The poligars were the local rulers of the region before it was conquered in the late 1700s first by the Mysore sultanate and then by the British and this rela tion is indicated as a contradiction relationship in the network diagr
28. it featured such fun activities as papering your office wall with Post It notes or 4 x 6 cards perhaps even gussied up with diverse highlighter colors APPENDIX Additional Information about NVivo 2 0 and ATLAS ti 5 0 Characteristic ATLAS ti 5 0 NVivo 2 0 Minimum Windows 98 and ME NT4 0 sp 6 Windows 98 and ME 32MB RAM system 2000 XP 2003 Intel Pentium NT4 0 sp 5 48MB RAM 2000 requirements AMD 133 MHz processor 64MB 64MB RAM XP 128MB RAM RAM 25MB hard disk space Intel Pentium 400mhz processor or equivalent 40MB 125MB hard disk space Manuals 417 page user and reference guide 165 page user guide 52 page 30 page quick tour manual Getting Started manual Help Online help file Web page Online help file Web page mailing list mailing list Document Rich text rtf ASCII or ANSI text Rich text rtf ASCII or ANSI text types txt MS Word MS Works 4 0 txt Windows Write WordPerfect MS Excel and Lotus 1 2 3 spread sheets HTML sound files au snd mp3 wav video files avi mpg mov qt wmv and many graphics file formats continued Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 462 FIELD METHODS APPENDIX continued Characteristic ATLAS ti 5 0 NVivo 2 0 Demo version _ http www scolari com http www scolari com download Web page http www atlasti com http www gqsrinternational com Ease of use Excellent Excellent Value Excelle
29. l Singh S ed 2003 Teaching qualitative research with QSR software Qualitative Research Journal http www latrobe edu au aqr journal special_AQR2003 pdf p 134 R BARRY LEWIS University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign R BARRY LEWIS is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign His current research is an ethnohistorical and archaeological study of the small kingdoms and cultural landscape of precolonial Mysore India Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology Dialogue for Ethically Con scious Practice edited by Carolyn Fluehr Lobban Walnut Creek CA Alta mira Press 2003 278 pp Walking the Tightrope Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers edited by Will C van den Hoonaard Toronto Canada University of Toronto Press 2002 218 pp Ethics in Qualitative Research edited by Melanie Mauthner Maxine Birch Julie Jessop and Tina Miller London Sage 2002 172 pp DOI 10 1177 1525822X04269173 These three collections on ethics in research provide a window on the shared moral and ethical dilemmas facing fieldworkers in different Western societies Authors in the United Kingdom Canada and the United States struggle with similar issues As research practices globalize these issues may be clothed differently in different places but communities of scholars puzzle through similar alternatives in their efforts to conduct responsible research Carolyn Fluehr Lobban s a
30. lorer in Figure 2 illustrates the use of sets to organize the Mysore test data documents according to particular reports Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 447 and chiefdoms Such sets can be useful for defining the scope of searches of the database or filtering the documents or nodes included or excluded from a set Attributes as the name suggests are such things as qualities or states that describe entities included in a project For example were we to define a case node for every individual who wrote at least one of the test data documents and then associate each individual s age English language fluency years of military experience religious preference and other personal attributes with his or her case node these data would be associated with all documents coded to a particular case node NVivo attributes are analytically useful in a number of ways not the least of which are the Attribute Explorer windows which give the user a spreadsheet like display of the attribute values associated with selected documents or nodes To understand readily the logic of NVivo s design one must note the dif ference between a code and a node as the terms are used in this software Richards 2002a 30 described a node as a location and coding as a process coding is the way in which you store pointers to the text The node there fore holds the pointers assigned by the coding process NVivo
31. n that score Interestingly enough however if you generate a report that contains some or all of these tables from within ATLAS ti running on Windows XP the rtf format file it produces wordwraps flawlessly and the tables look like they did in the original ATLAS ti also experienced problems with relatively complex HTML documents One of the test HTML files for example contained Microsoft photo gallery entities a relatively new Webbot feature that ATLAS ti appar ently cannot load Generally speaking however ATLAS ti s performance in this area is nothing short of brilliant by comparison with NVivo If you cannot get your data into ATLAS ti then you probably are not trying very hard As with NVivo primary documents also can be edited in ATLAS ti but many users may fail to appreciate how complex the editing of an indexed text can be especially if the documents in question are being accessed and modi fied as part of a team based research project for single user projects it is not such a big deal ATLAS ti s documentation takes pains to instill good editing practices in its users and includes several features to facilitate team based research projects that share one set of primary documents Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 455 Codes and Memos Coding is easily done in ATLAS ti and without the quirky node concerns of NVivo As with earlier versions of ATLAS ti codes memos
32. n the market today QSR Interna tional s Web site http www gqsrinternational com offers additional infor mation and help There is also a mailing list to subscribe to the QSR forum send the message SUBSCRIBE qsr forum your_first_name your_last_name to mailing list request qsr com au Lyn Richards and others have done a particularly fine job of bringing NVivo and other QSR products to the attention of researchers and prospec tive customers by publishing QDA textbooks that feature this software e g Bazeley and Richards 2000 Gibbs 2002 Morse and Richards 2002 QSR International also recently supported a conference that yielded a Qualitative Research Journal special issue titled Teaching Qualitative Research with QSR Software Singh 2003 This kind of support has been a smart business move on the part of QSR International because it helps build the market and sell their products at the same time Inputting and Managing Data When you start NVivo you are presented with a small window called the Launch Pad which is essentially a button pad of four basic choices create a new project open an existing project open a tutorial or exit the program Simple but direct Clicking on any choice other than exiting the program takes you to more screens that help you set up your project or choose an exist ing project or tutorial NVivo allows the user a lot of control over the creation of a new project it can be given a title and summ
33. ng If you have been smart and used your word processor s style sheets facility to format your text file NVivo can use the assigned styles as an implicit outline of the struc ture of your documents to ease the task of autocoding and defining the scope of searches Unfortunately this only works for rich text text Although NVivo can handle texts in non Roman characters such as Chinese and Japanese it can not import rich text files that contain tables or graphics of any kind nor can NVivo or ATLAS ti import the footnotes in these documents When I attempted to import the rtf format test data used for this review NVivo rejected out of hand all the files with tables The workaround I found was to convert the tables to text before saving to rtf format the files of which they were a part I could then import and more important code the entire docu Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 445 FIGURE 3 NVivo Node Explorer E Node Explorer Mysore Test Data Set Tools Ven o i p Vv F Propertes Attributes EdtSet Asay Search T Recently Used Passages Created NodSed l Cares 10 atie t 1f10 200 1100 th Trocs 7 date 1 10 2009 410 200 sorags Fenty choos lfe 1 10 2909 1 11 2300 D cases 5 Cotenays 1 10209 1 10 200 a 5 m bitsy Engagement Forbficsbon wells O 1 10 2093 110 200 a a Gonoaoay 1 10 2093 14 10 200
34. nt Very good Single license 950 retail 470 educational 735 retail 445 educational site pricing 180 student site licenses licenses and NUDsIST 5 6 and upgrades and volume discounts NVivo 1 upgrades available available Where can Scolari Sage Publications Software you buy it 2455 Teller Road 6 Bonhill Street Thousand Oaks CA 91320 London EC2A 4PU United Kingdom phone 805 499 1325 phone 44 0 20 7330 1222 fax 805 499 0871 fax 44 0 20 7374 8741 e mail info sagepub com e mail info scolari co uk NOTES 1 One solution for the Mac OS is Microsoft Virtual PC http www microsoft com windowsxp virtualpc which as the name suggests enables Mac users to run Windows software 2 Like many researchers I would also find it quite useful to include Adobe Acrobat pdf format files in my data sets simply because so much journal literature is now available in that form Although such capabilities are beyond what QDA software can do at the moment there are several ways to do it First if you own or have access to the full version of Adobe Acrobat 6 0 not just the free Acrobat Reader you can save unprotected Acrobat files as doc rtf txt docu ments all of which can be imported by NVivo and ATLAS ti Adobe Acrobat 6 0 Professional retails for 449 but you should be able to find it discounted for as little as 189 Second ScanSoft s PDF converter for Microsoft Word can convert most but by no means all pdf f
35. nthology is the second edition of a 1991 col lection on ethics in anthropology that provided historical overviews philo sophical positions and disciplinary and subdisciplinary perspectives For this revision several authors have updated their original chapters Some of the new chapters address new developments and others replace chapters on similar topics Fluehr Lobban active in ethics policy for the American An Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015
36. onducting the reviews Second ATLAS ti can generate a wide range of output and reports based on your analysis of an HU ATLAS ti data entities can be exported in HTML or XML eXtensible Markup Language format XML is designed to ease the task of working with structured data e g Web pages books warehouse inventories and like HTML is an SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language application Harold and Means 2002 If you are unfamiliar with XML ATLAS ti includes examples of it in action that will definitely catch your attention As in ATLAS ti 4 codes and code families can also be exported as an SPSS syntax file for quantitative analysis To sum up my examination of ATLAS ti it is an outstanding example of creative software design and I look forward to using it in my own research Scientific Software Development has kept the best features of previous ver sions and taken some giant steps in improving ATLAS ti s ability to work with a wide range of qualitative data Iam particularly impressed by the facil ity with which one can directly code query and analyze text audio pictures video HTML and other data types in ATLAS ti 5 0 This feature alone gives ATLAS ti a tremendous competitive edge over NVivo which can only directly analyze text Given its many outstanding features and its data handling capa bilities ATLAS ti is an excellent choice for just about any QDA research project CONCLUSIONS NVivo and ATLAS ti are both fine
37. or features strengths and weak nesses of both programs The main areas addressed include ease of installa tion help for new users interface design inputting and managing data cod ing searches and queries and creating models of data relationships To anticipate my conclusions ATLAS ti 5 0 and NVivo 2 0 are excellent prod ucts that show significant improvements from earlier versions Although their capabilities continue to converge with each new release ATLAS ti impresses me more than NVivo as a general purpose QDA workhorse Read on to find out why Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 441 NVIVO 2 0 QSR International currently markets two QDA software products NVivo and NUD IST the latter of which was QSR International s first QDA package A brief comparison of these products can be found on the QSR International Web site at http www gqsrinternational com products productoverview comparison htm Given my experience with older versions of NUDIST Lewis 1998 I view NVivo as an enhanced version of that product I also believe that most users will find NVivo to be a better value than NUD amp IST Setting Up NVivo 2 0 arrives in the familiar industry standard shrink wrapped box containing a CD ROM two manuals and a couple of printed forms includ ing a software license and a product maintenance agreement that you can purchase on an annual basis The maintenance agr
38. ormat files into Microsoft Word documents Information about PDF converter for Microsoft Word which retails for 49 99 but for which I have seen street prices for as little as 39 86 can be found at http www scansoft com pdfconverter 3 My 1998 comparative review examined ATLAS ti first For the sake of fairness to the two companies I consider the QSR International product first this time around 4 Most word processing software and many other mainstream applications give the user the option to save work in a rich text format recognizable by the extension rtf that appears after the file name If you were to look inside a rich text file you would find all the text from the Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 REVIEW ESSAYS 463 original file but embedded in a standard markup language that encodes font choices point sizes margins paragraph styles table formats and so on Since the markup language is published pro grammers who create other applications can easily write the code necessary to import rich text format files into their applications and have the results look just as they did in the program that originally created these files Rich text format therefore helps users solve the problem of mov ing formatted text files between programs 5 NVivo 2 0 also can import NUDsIST 4 0 5 0 and 6 0 projects 6 Most word processing software enables the user to assign specific fonts point
39. rograms for example required the researcher to convert text files to ASCII or ANSI file formats before inputting them which meant of course that the section and other formatting were stripped away from a text file before it was imported a process that also made it difficult to import such things as tables and footnotes As if this were not enough there was the fur Field Methods Vol 16 No 4 November 2004 439 469 2004 Sage Publications 439 Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 440 FIELD METHODS ther problem that the objective of QDA software is after all the analysis of qualitative data which are nearly always more than just lines of text Such data also include photographs drawings videos sounds smells you get the picture Although it has long been evident to users and software develop ers alike that the perfect QDA program would somehow enable one to cap ture nontext information store it compare it classify it integrate it with the textual data and do all the other data management and most importantly of all analytical tasks that one must do in such a study developers understand far better than users that such software is not easily written In 1998 NUDeIST 4 0 had the facility to link nontextual data with the textual data ina study Lewis 1998 but all this really accomplished was to give one a place holder a virtual note or memorandum that other data exist that are import
40. sizes col ors and appearances to repeated text patterns the most common example being chapter or sec tion headings Microsoft Word users can read details about how to assign and use style sheets by looking up the formatting topic in the online help facility 7 The test tables were just formatted text files not something fancy such as embedded MS Excel spreadsheets NVivo cannot import the latter either 8 An embedded object refers to information an object from program X that is inserted into a file created by program Y An example is a Microsoft Excel table that you paste into a Microsoft Word document You can do this several ways including pasting it into the Word document as a Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object Done in this manner the object in this case a table is said to be embedded in the Word file It cannot be edited directly within Word but if you double click on it the table will open itself in a table size Excel window so you can edit it using all the functionality of the latter program assuming of course that you have Microsoft Excel installed on the computer in question 9 StarOffice 7 was released while this review was being written As with previous versions of this outstanding office suite package it is a free download roughly 125MB for students and teachers For additional information point your browser to http www sun com products n solutions edu solutions staroffice html 10 Like other Dravidian
41. step format as the Getting Started guide but covers these steps in greater detail taking 165 pages to do so As I learned NVivo s capabilities I found myself refer Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 442 FIELD METHODS ring more often to the Getting Started guide for answers than to the Using NVivo manual because the latter is designed to be both a user manual and an introduction to qualitative data analysis which means you sometimes have to hunt around in it for program specific answers Both manuals are how ever well organized and follow the same chapter format The Getting Started manual includes more screen shots of the program in use which I always find helpful it is also better edited The Using NVivo manual contains several sections with glaring typographical errors and editorial lapses e g on pp 10 11 a three sentence passage is repeated almost word for word a quarter of a page later The online help facility is extensive well designed and offers more detailed information than either of the printed manuals There are also sev eral online tutorials each of which is aimed at a different set of tasks or level of proficiency in the use of the product Taken as a whole NVivo s docu mentation is reasonably comparable to that of ATLAS ti The main manuals for both products take slightly different approaches but the user is well served in each case As with every major software product o
42. super families Audio and video coding is handled by the MediaControl tool which is a small panel with the necessary controls to play replay mark and code pas sages of multimedia files I tried it out on the Welcome to India mp3 audio file and found it easy to use As one would reasonably expect the video ver sion of the MediaControl tool features all of the audio controls plus a small screen ATLAS ti would not recognize my Apple Quicktime mov format video file but after converting it to avi format the file was easily displayed and coded Searches and Queries Among the many strengths of ATLAS ti 4 were its tools for searches and queries to identify text patterns in the primary documents of an HU These tools continue to be important features of the latest version Searches can be simple text searches or regular expressions using the syntax of grep aregular expression search tool in the UNIX operating system Jeffrey 2002 The search feature displays the hits one by one More useful in my view is the ATLAS ti Object Crawler with which you can design searches that give you considerable control over scope and the objects to be included in the search ATLAS ti s ability to construct complex queries continues to be an area in which the program really shines Figure 8 shows the Query Tool the layout of which appears to be largely unchanged from ATLAS ti 4 The column of buttons down the left side of the window signify the Boole
43. tained each hit 99 66 vides an easily used set of tools to build graphical representations of the pat terns and relationships between documents and nodes that emerge from the analysis of a project database This tool is a marked improvement over its Downloaded from fmx sagepub com at SAGE Publications on April 20 2015 450 FIELD METHODS FIGURE 5 NVivo Model Explorer Model Ceptorer Mysore Test Data Me ochd wer loob 7305 onae x N Veddo Coriaria of Fat Ninge P voces O Fort Sicrage M Correct 1735 07 JE Apai cowe better to rect NOTE Models of possible data relationships are easily created and modified The left panel shows a list of all models created in the present project The main work space is the right window in which graphical representations of possible relationships between documents nodes memos sets and even other models are created and modified counterpart in NUDeIST and is comparable to the Network Editor in ATLAS ti Figure 5 shows a simple model of a relationship in the Mysore test data set between the types of storage facilities found in forts the carts that were the main means by which these facilities were filled and a 1798 report on the condition of forts that lay along possible lines of advance of East India Com pany forces into Mysore from their bases on the Tamil coast The documents nodes attributes sets and other elements in a model can be added in several ways perhaps the e
44. ws Explorer a core utility application that gives users a graphical tree diagram of the locations and properties of files and most of NVivo s analyt ical capabilities can be accessed from these Explorers Whereas the Explor ers enable the user to examine and manage hierarchical trees of documents and nodes Document and Node Browsers display individual documents and nodes and coded passages in the documents The Node Browser is a power ful tool for displaying coding and recontextualizing data Richards 2002b 84 85 that enables the researcher to focus attention on the material coded at particular nodes and reassess or change the coding Documents also can be edited or created in NVivo and the changes saved without affecting existing coding of the document Memos that if used effectively greatly help self document a project as it develops can be attached to just about anything in a NVivo database I could for example cut and paste the lost footnotes from the test documents from the original word processing files to memos attached to the same respective target passages in my project documents Two other important components of the Project Pad are tabs for editing and exploring sets and attributes of the documents and nodes in a project see Figure 1 For the test data NVivo groups such things as the documents writ ten by a particular person or nodes pertaining to military stores For example the left panel of the Document Exp
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