Academic Consulting

Having worked with NVivo on a number of our own projects, as well as those of clients, we’ve discovered a few tips and tricks along the way that we thought might be useful to share. The tips are by no means the “right” way to code (there is no such thing!), but we’ve certainly found that we’ve saved ourselves some time, not to mention headaches, by following the suggestions below. Note that the following comments assume that you’re familiar with the concept of nodes in NVivo – if you need clarification of this please visit our ‘What is a node?’ FAQ.

Less is More

This generally useful principle can be applied to NVivo in two ways – firstly, try to avoid having too many nodes. There is no hard and fast rule as to how many nodes you should have, as it obviously depends hugely on your project i.e. the nature of your data, your methodology, and your research question. One of the problems with NVivo (admittedly a positive one) is that it’s extremely easy to create nodes and perform coding. Therefore it’s extremely easy to get carried away with node creation. Back when we used techniques such as highlighter pens, we were restricted to nine different colours or so, and hence needed to reign ourselves in a bit. Now there is no such restriction!

The combination of the ease of use of NVivo and a tendency to want to code at quite specific categories, can actually result in an unmanageable number of nodes to work with. It may become so difficult to locate your nodes that you end up creating even further categories which are actually duplicates. In addition to this, a large number of very specific nodes can negatively influence your capacity to perform a sensible analysis. Our Director, Dr Lyn Lavery, posted to the QSR Forum some time ago on this issue – those of you that are likely to get carried away with creating nodes, may find her post useful.

Another application of the “less is more” principle is in regards to the amount of text to select when coding. There is a tendency when coding to want to select some context around the idea that you’re coding. While this seems like a good idea in theory, the problem is that when you later open up your node to review the text, you often end up with lots of extra reading to do because of all the extra context you’ve selected. Coding this extra context is actually unnecessary in NVivo as the software allows you to revisit the context from coded text if need be. For example, if you have coded a few sentences at a node and then later realise you need the surrounding information, it is possible to right-click over the text and choose either Open Referenced Source, Coding Context, or Spread Coding. All three of these options will allow you to view the context should you need to, and mean that you don’t need to unnecessarily 'clog up' the node with unnecessary material.

Some NVivo Coding Quirks

Over the years in our NVivo training sessions we’ve come across a few minor annoyances that NVivo users have. The biggest annoyance is the fact that when performing 'drag and drop' coding, it’s exceedingly easy to accidentally re-arrange the text within your source document. Obviously it’s simple enough to immediately ‘Undo’ this, but if you find it happening often, you may want to consider making your document ‘Read Only’. There are a couple ways to do this, one would be to tick the ‘Read Only’ box in the Document Properties (right-click on the document and choose Document Properties to access this). The other option is to view the ‘Coding Density Bar’ (from the menu bar choose View > Coding Stripes > Coding Density Only). This appears as a stripe down the right-hand side of your document that gets darker in shading the more often a line of text has been coded. Turning the Coding Density Bar on ensures your document is ‘Read Only’ and also means that you can see when you have performed coding as it will become darker in colour. It has the added advantage that if you ‘hover’ over the stripe it will list all the nodes that you’ve coded that line of text at. A final tip for drag and drop coding – it’s much easier to have your Detail View on the right-hand side rather than the bottom of the interface. To change this, choose View > Detail View > Right from the NVivo menu bar.

Some NVivo users complain that it’s not possible to view Free Nodes and Tree nodes at the same time. This tends to only be an issue for those of us who have used earlier versions of the software, as we’ve got used to being able to do this. If you find this particularly cumbersome, then why not make a branch of the Tree Nodes called ‘Free Nodes’ and create your Free Nodes there? There’s no specific reason they have to be stored in the Free Nodes folder, it’s more of an organisational tool than anything else.

Coding annoyance number three is that whenever you close and re-open your project, the tree nodes all collapse up and it’s necessary to ‘re-expand’ them. Nvivo 8 has a nice feature to help with this – simply right click on a top-level node and choose Expand/Collapse > Expand All Tree Nodes.

The sort order of nodes in the List View can be another annoyance for NVivo users. Once again this is easily solved as you can create a ‘Custom Sort’ order to keep your nodes ordered the way you like them. There are details on how to do this in our Knowledge Base – click here to visit this particular topic.

Final Tips

It would be remiss of us to not mention the importance of node descriptions in an article on coding tips. Taking the time to enter in node descriptions when you create nodes can be enormously beneficial to your project. Nodes can often represent quite abstract concepts, and it’s easy for us to forget what we intended at the time we created them. Descriptions are also essential when working in teams so that everyone has a shared understanding of the categories. Descriptions can be entered within the ‘New Free Node’ and ‘New Tree Node’ dialog boxes. Alternatively, if you need to enter them in after a node has been created then select the required node and press Ctrl + Shift + P to open the 'Properties' box.

Lastly, don’t under-estimate how long the coding process will take. Even with the benefit of a tool such as NVivo, qualitative data is extremely complex and it takes time to do it justice. Leave yourself more time than you think you’ll actually need for this stage when designing research timeframes.