As I re-read my post from Wednesday, I was thinking about my inital reaction to NVivo'sassumption that one must have predetermined categories. After letting the thoughts from class and from the blog settle, I thought that actually it is important to admit that we do come into research with assumptions and things we are looking for; NVivo allows the researcher to add and change categories (I think?), so it may not be as constraining as I initially thought. I also wondered if it would be wise to use different software packages for different purposes and questions. Woods and Dempster's (2011) article was nicely timed to help me think through this question.
I appreciated the authors' description of Transana, and while I don't fully understand its capabilities, the ability to look at multiple transcripts at once is intruiging. However, the big takeaway for me was the assertion that different questions call for different types of analysis, and that different data may call for different analysis software in the same way that one would use different methods for different data and questions.
Choosing and committing to a particular analytical software package is a daunting task that I don't want to make until I have a more grounded understanding of the differing affordances of each package. It seems that each has some basic functionality, but they exist because they answer different kinds of questions. Therefore, as usual, it is the context that matters; one isn't necessarily better than another - they are more or less well-suited for different purposes.
And this thought reminded me that, while I have a certain epistemologial frame that shapes the way I approach research and the methods I use, I need to keep looking for the right method for asking a specific question with X kind of data. So while Woods and Dempster focused on explaining how different questions can be answered within a particular tool, their discussion led me to think more broadly about choosing the right tool for the specified questions.
This post is kind of a ramble, but it is this way because I am at a place where I am beginning to really feel my grounding as a researcher, and I am having to make deliberate choices as I move away from my advisor's work and into my own. I think I'm going through an intellectual growth spurt, and this think-aloud post is part of that process. In any case, I really appreciated Woods and Dempster's article because, in addition to providing information about Transana and software packages in general, it got me thinking on a broader level. Apologies for the stream-of-conscioussness of this post.
Awesome! Yes - different packages really do support different research approaches and processes. The differences, particularly when comparing NVIvo, ATLAS and MAXQDA, are seemingly small, but as researchers we will develop preferences as our researcher identities deepen. (I really like your language around "grounding as a researcher").
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, indeed we do come to our work with presupposition -- we all do. Yet, how this translates into coding often differs across methodologies. Nonetheless, we can 'make' NVivo do what we need it to do even if we are not using hiearchical coding structures. Perhaps, we prefer the "flat" coding structure of ATLAS and then have to adapt it's structure in order to make some hierarchical patterns. All this to say, we can make the packages work for our orientation. Yet, it is nice to find one that works well across much of one's work -- although this can quickly become variant when collaborators use different packages.