Currently, NVivo is one of the most popular softwares for qualitative researches. It is so powerful since it allows us to share projects with colleagues; importing and analysing any combination of documents, spreadsheets, databases, audios, video or pictures; manage our bibliographical data; code our sources with the application of dragging and dropping which are quick and easy; have a more intuitive view of our data which assist us to generate findings.
There are also some limitations of this NVivo. It is not able to recognize some types of documents (e.g. JPF). It can not help researchers to transcribe voice interviews to plain words (we have to manually transcribe voice interviews to words, which takes plenty of time). NVivo just provides some assistance to view the data in a relatively clear way, which is a dispensable tool for qualitative researchers. Barry this in mind, Nivo can be seen as an editing tool rather than analysing tool. After all, it is researchers who have to think and analyse data. However, it would be great if NVivo can incorporate some analysing functions (e.g. incorporating some analysing functions alike the regressions analysis in most quantative research softwares).
If used properly and efficiently, I think NVivo is of great value. Particularly, I reckon NVivo will be of great importance in big qualitative research project.
I am also a PhD student, and I have been considering using NVivo for quite some time. However, after testing it, it was clear that NVivo's PDF support is very bad. They said that they will release an update next month or so which will fix this.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this is not the only issue. The fact that the project file and everything else are imported to the same file is scary. For instance, what if a bug arises? You wouldn't be able to run and access anything out of NVivo. This is a serious issue I believe since this file could also get very big and could take NVivo to become slow. I am not thinking about using these resources for a year or two, so I need to take this into consideration.
On the other hand, I found Atlas.ti, and although I don't like it's user interface compared to NVivo, the good thing is that it doesn't store everything within the same file, instead, it created a project file that creates links to these files.
This might be useful to some of you but I found that using Mendeley as a reference management tool with Atlas.ti is actually very beneficial. Since Mendeley provides the ability to auto sort your references files/pdfs into a structure that you define.
I hope my comment helps! but yea to be short, as much as I was VERY excited about NVivo, these shortcomings are not helping.
Goodluck!