On a mixed methods project, I’ll often have my demographics stored in SPSS rather than something like Excel. In order to run these types of queries, NVivo needs to know the demographics (or other characteristics) of your participants – that’s where classification sheets come in. They’re incredibly useful for running queries in NVivo – for example, you might want to look at what males said about a particular topic versus females. If you’re new to the idea of classifications, they’re a way of recording demographic or descriptive information within your project – details such as the gender of your research participants. In terms of how I’ll be using NVivo 12 with my SPSS data, one of the key things for me will be the import of classification sheets. Neither of these were a massive issue, but I’m not a fan of double-handling files (I like to keep things simple – research is hard enough without dealing with multiple versions of files) and I also think time is precious, so anything that saves me time is a good thing! Why am I so excited? Mixed methods data analysis was always possible in NVivo, but it was necessary to use Excel as an intermediate step – SPSS files had to be saved in Excel before importing as a classification sheet, and the results of queries had to be exported to Excel before being taken over to SPSS for further analysis. NVivo and SPSS both feature heavily in the toolkit I use as a researcher, so I was pretty excited when I heard that NVivo 12 would enable me to work with SPSS data for my mixed methods research.
0 kommentar(er)
