NVivo Make You Enjoy Doing Qualitative Research

4 years ago, I've set my PhD journey maximum of 38 months. However after 6 months I sailed on it, this unpredictable journey has warned me that I may need more time. Never across in my mind that I may end up shifting my epistemology and methodology to qualitative research paradigm. But as a Muslim, I take it positively and remind myself that my God won't throw me into something that I'm not able to survive. There always wisdom and lessons to be learnt of what had happen to ourselves.

It is not an easy situation for me who has been trained and so use to quantitative method and then has to travel with other method in this journey. At first I can’t imagine how I am going to manage the qualitative data. Furthermore, I have to work with in-depth interviews, radio programs, and focus group interviews. It is not make sense to convert those data into something that can be quantify and analyse using quantitative method.

At last I found a remedy for all my worries. Thanks to QSR for their latest qualitative analysis software namely NVivo version 8. Never in my mind NVivo will be my companion in my PhD. Knowing that I’m out of time to manage and analyse the data, I really need best technique and method to help me out. With very limited experience and knowledge about the software, I put my full effort to learn as much as I can about the software. The latest version, really awesome… It ability to do coding directly from the raw source of data such recorded audio and video interviews as well on many types of document, has make NVivo do the impossible just got possible. Besides that, findings and the data analysis results can be presented in many formats such as charts, table, graph, matrix and model.

For those who’re engaged qualitative method in their research, I strongly recommended NVivo to assist you managing and analysing your data. Some interactive tutorial about NVivo software can be access via this link. Big thanks also to the co-founder of this software, Lyn Richards, who has produce a tutorial to teach us in more easy and practical way on how to use this software. Her tutorial can be download here.