General Tips for All Methods

• Licenses: Normally team members would each be working on their own computers with their own NVivo licenses, and all team members need to be using the same version of NVivo. Consult NVivo’s compatibility help pages for more information.
• Initials: When you first installed NVivo, you would’ve been prompted to set your initials. Anything you create or change in NVivo, will be tagged with your initials. Watch out if multiple people on the team have the same initials - make sure everyone is unique for NVivo! You can adjust your initials, or make NVivo prompt for initials every time it opens. Consult NVivo’s help pages for Windows or MacOS for more information.
• Codes: If team members are creating new codes, it might be helpful for them to put their initials in the title of the codes to quickly see who created what (note though that if the codes list is opened up fully, you will also see initials next to codes in the created by column). Alternatively, you could create folders or parent codes under Codes for each team member to put new codes they create. If team members create new codes, they should also use the Code properties to make notes about the code and provide some examples to remember what it means and when it is used. Some teams also create a “problems/questions” code to flag things they want to discuss in a team meeting.
• Communication: Team members should meet often to discuss the coding, how the project is going, themes emerging, etc. You can also use memos in NVivo to record and share thoughts about the project and to store meeting minutes.
• Reports: After merging project files, NVivo will open a report showing you changes. You can also create custom reports from the Share menu (Windows only). Consult NVivo’s pages on reports for Windows for more information.
• Test Merge/Pilot: First try doing a small amount of coding on one or two files, and then do a merge back into the master project file. This gives you an opportunity to try out the full merging process and look at the options for comparing multiple coders’ work before getting too deep into the project (see next section). For some projects, if you are working as part of a team because you want to speed up the coding process by dividing the work, you may want to first test how team members are applying the codebook before launching into the full coding. You could get two people to do a full code of one or two documents using the agreed upon codebook, merge, compare the coding (see next section), and then discuss as a team the results and challenges. You may need to do this multiple times with different combinations of team mates to check everyone’s coding. In the end, you want everyone on the same page in terms of interpreting the codebook before you divide and conquer the work. This might result in adding more information to the codebook to clarify the meaning and application of the codes, or adding or subtracting codes.
• Comparing Coding:
  • Coding Comparison Query: After merging project files, you may want to compare different team mates’ coding to each other. To view changes, one option is to run a coding comparison query to see the percentage agreement and where there are differences. Try running it for one document, comparing two coders that worked on it. The results are by code. If the Kappa is 1, the two coders agreed, if it is 0, they didn’t agree (such as where one person picked a code and another person picked a different code), or between 0 and 1 (such as when the same code was picked but not applied on exactly the same segment of text). You could try to focus on the rows where the Kappa is not 1. You can double click on a row to see more details/context. It will show you all the instances of that code in the file with coding stripes turned on, but keep in mind you will be looking at it as one code per file. Consult NVivo’s help pages for Windows or MacOS for more information.
  • Coding Stripes: Another option is to use coding stripes. In addition to codes, you can also select users, to see who coded what and compare. Coding stripes are useful to turn on not just when looking at a document, but also when looking at the references for a particular code. In Windows, it will show you one stripe with lighter or darker shading to show you where there’s overlap between two coders. You can right click on the stripe and select Show Substripes->More Substripes and pick the users to see more details. Consult NVivo’s help pages for Windows or MacOS for more information.

You might want to combine the approaches, if you can – run the coding comparison query on multiple files to find out which files have the biggest differences in coding, then use coding stripes on those files to look at the details.

• Notes:
  • Coded segment totals count multiple coders’ coding as one if there’s overlap.
  • If you show references to a code, the larger of the two references is shown. You’d have to turn on coding stripes for users to see the differences. If two people picked a different code for the same segment, the segment will show up in both places when you look at the references, but you’d have to turn on the coding stripes for users and hover over the stripe to see which code which user picked.
  • Edits to memo links are retained/merged, but not edits to the code properties - so deal with codebook edits as a team.

Technique: Qualitative Data Analysis | Tools: NVivo