Understanding NVivo and How The Typing Works Supports Researchers Using It – article by Peter Gresty
If you’re involved in qualitative research, you’ve likely heard of NVivo. But what exactly is it, and how does it work?
What is NVivo?
NVivo is a software tool designed to help researchers organise, analyse, and find insights in qualitative data like interviews, focus groups, open-ended survey responses, and more. It’s especially helpful when you have large amounts of text-based data and need a structured way to make sense of it all.
How Does NVivo Work?
At its core, NVivo helps you code data. This means tagging parts of the text (like quotes from interviews) with labels or categories that represent themes, topics, or ideas. Over time, as you code more and more, you begin to see patterns and trends in your data. NVivo also lets you run queries, compare themes, and even visualise the connections between them with charts or word clouds.
Put simply: NVivo doesn’t do your thinking for you, but it gives you the tools to explore your data more deeply and keep everything organised.
How The Typing Works Supports NVivo Users
At The Typing Works, we’ve had the opportunity to liaise closely with a client who regularly uses NVivo for their academic research. Through this collaboration, we developed a special transcript template that works seamlessly with NVivo’s coding and data analysis features.
This NVivo-friendly transcript format ensures:
- Consistent speaker labels
- Clear time stamps
- Structured layout that makes coding easier
By using this template, researchers can import transcripts directly into NVivo and start coding right away, without needing to reformat or adjust the text.
Planning to Use NVivo?
If you’re planning to use NVivo for your research, please mention it when uploading your files. Peter and the team at The Typing Works will make sure your transcripts are prepared using the NVivo-compatible template, helping you jump straight into your analysis with ease. Contact us today.