Looking for a respite out of sight of Zoom or email pile-ups? Consider pulling up a virtual seat at the FSC’s remote-access computer lab where a variety of specialty software to help organize your big data or other research files is just a login away.
NVivo is the most popular program among users currently remoting-in to the lab, where SPSS, Stata, Atlas.ti, and ArcGIS are also available. Among its attributes, NVivo can accommodate a wide variety of documents and types of unstructured data (interviews, surveys, images, PDFs, and audio files), can represent data visually, and doesn’t require extensive training to use. Chief Research Methodologist Jessi Bishop-Royse has assembled NVivo training guides and video resources (see recent post) for new users and is available to advise along the way.
One of those new users is Erin Workman, assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse and director of First-Year Writing. She and her research team, WRD Professor and LAS Executive Associate Dean Pete Vandenberg and two students, are working on a multi-stage institutional ethnographic study begun in 2018. The project has an intrinsically nebulous research focus not easily or directly measurable: perceptions of writing by DePaul stakeholders (peer tutors and administrators in the University Center for Writing-based Learning, undergraduate students majoring or minoring in WRD, plus administrators and faculty in units across the university). They want to find out not only where writing is valued and supported within DePaul, but how people’s conceptions of writing shape the what, how, and why of their regular writing activity.
Recently, they committed their sprawling data set of 99 interview transcripts, 22 surveys, and more than 1,500 pages of assorted institutional and individually produced documents including archived website pages to NVivo’s coding capabilities. The next step will be regrouping to examine the university-level data more intensively to generate further coding.
“So far we’ve had a good experience. Importing files has been incredibly easy,” said Erin. “We appreciate the variety of file types that can work with NVivo, including image files. Being able to code pieces of images is especially exciting.” Other benefits include NVivo’s capacity to reveal patterns and relationships within themes, and to throw up snippets of participant dialogue. Its wide-ranging mapping and imagery features offer additional analytic help, not to mention the relief of tediously hand-coding data or devising elaborate DIY organizational schemes.
“You can set up cases to group individual files so that you can see everything in one space,” Erin noted. “As we continue generating codes and coding the data, we’ll be able to see all the material pertinent to a code, and then we can also see the coded material pertinent to a particular case.”
Maria Ferrera, associate professor of the Department of Social Work and co-director of the Center for Community Health Equity, has introduced NVivo coding to social work graduate students and students from other disciplines, including work related to an ethnographic project she and two now-former DPU faculty organized. That project examined health-related issues among residents of Washington Park and the Lower West Side/Pilsen, two working class communities separated by a 12-year difference in life expectancy rates. “We wanted to look at what was happening in these neighborhoods from an ethnographic standpoint,” Maria explained. The students took part in interviews which explored how the built environment shaped residents’ health practices and decision-making.
Students participating in various research projects with Maria have utilized the NVivo platform to learn how to create a codebook, leading to the development of papers around themes and contents derived from the interview transcripts. “I think the research experience really helped them get a sense of what does this entail and the level of detail and the amount of time it takes, particularly to do mixed methods and qualitative research, and the process of the interview,” she added. “What does that look like on a transcript and how do we organize our thoughts? How do we even begin to analyze this data, which is sometimes hundreds of pages in projects? The NVivo program helped us manage the interviews and the transcripts in a way that we could make sense of them as a team.”
Research by remote access both rewards and challenges users. For Maria, tying access to a machine rather than to an individual had made it easy to continue working without interruption when graduating students leave a project and new users join. “It was a huge, huge help,” she said. “It always amazed me that we could just log in virtually.” She welcomed not having to invest in a license or travel between campuses as well as having FSC on call if anyone had problems with access or connectivity. “The response was so quick,” she said. “I’ve appreciated it tremendously.”
To remotely learn how to maneuver NVivo, the WRD team holds self-help meetings on Zoom to walk through the process and to develop consensus around importing and classifying data, enabling them to start generating codes. Since the four team members must share two computer logins, they rely on a dynamic project folder on Google Drive to keep everyone on the same work page. On the plus side of the ledger, team member Madeline Crozier, a DePaul graduate with a B.A. and an M.A. in WRD who is now a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, can still participate in the project that she joined in the first stage.
The remote interview process that COVID further imposed upon their project brought the group an unexpected dividend. They were preparing to examine the writing process at the university level through interviews with DePaul faculty and administrators when the pandemic shutdown occurred, followed quickly by a call for proposals for a special COVID-related issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Business and Technical Communication. With a sudden pivot, they slightly modified the project protocols to include a couple new interview questions, received IRB approval, and in lightning time produced an unanticipated new paper from the project, “Drafting Pandemic Policy: Writing and Sudden Institutional Change.” The paper appeared in the journal online in September. It documents the impact on policy development and on writing practices and technologies of DPU’s unprecedentedly swift adoption of a pass/fail grading option amidst the new context of remote teaching and learning.
If rosy new research horizons feature in your future, contact the Faculty Scholarship Collaborative and we’ll set you up. Admitting help is the first step toward advancement!
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