That is a decision that should be made by you and your chair. You can hand code but a program will work better since it creates your charts, graphs and codebook as you code. If you hand code, you will have to created all those by hand and using excel or another program.

So-called manual or hand-coding of qualitative data is quite acceptable, and it works well for small datasets.

But the idea of finding your themes by simply reading the data is probably not enough to count as a systematic analysis.

The two main methods of coding qualitative data are computer-assisted coding and hand coding. Choosing either approach relies heavily on an investigator’s inclination and expertise as well as on the size of collected data. Either way, the researcher is the pulsing heart of the coding process and the one who decides how to code! However, since we live in a digital age, blessed with a plethora of open-source software, and most young scholars are digital natives or techno-savvies, the preference between the two tends toward computer-assisted coding—even for a small set of qualitative data. The following could be of interest.

Nason, E. E., Wang, K., & Ausbrooks, A. R. (2022). A user-friendly introduction to RQDA for qualitative research: Recommendations for social work students and educators. Journal of Social Work Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2022.2033657

Nelson, L. K., Burk, D., Knudsen, M., & McCall, L. (2021). The future of coding: A comparison of hand-coding and three types of computer-assisted text analysis methods. Sociological Methods & Research, 50(1), 202–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124118769114

Good luck,

I agree that using software for qualitative data coding is fast and convenient, especially for large data sets, than manual coding. However, one should be well trained in how to use these software/coding programs, otherwise, go the manual way. The most valuable thing for maunal coding is that the researcher get to immerse themselves in the data. Also, one must document every process and changes that occur throughout the coding exercise.

Hi Himani Mishra from my experience CQDAS software is not sine qua non condition for qualitative data analysis but the more interviews you have to handle the more it is helpful. When you have 10-15 interviews you can easily work without CAQDAS but 60 and more are difficult to handle (the software offers you helpful searching tools important fo conceptualizations)

Good luck!

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NVivo is a useful tool which saves the qualitative researcher time and gives the sort of coverage for extensive text analysis otherwise not feasible. Here is an example of recent work. Full credit to Dr Adil Bilal from whom I learnt so much about the tool and its effective utilization.

Adil Bilal

Arnob Zahid, Jennifer Kay Poulsen, Ravi Sharma, Stephen C. Wingreen, A systematic review of emerging information technologies for sustainable data-centric health-care, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 149, 2021, 104420, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2021.104420.

Quick answer : No, it's not.

Long answer: A researcher can opt in to do coding manually, which is a daunting process. Nvivo has got a lot of things figured out for you, such as file organization, categorising, coding, relationships and even a word cloud!

Howbeit, the software has several major limitations if you start using it for large scale projects. One big drawback is that it offers not much when it comes to collaboration. Even though Nvivo cloud has the concept of collaboration, it really is not collaboration as you have to finish your part and upload it.

It also sometimes fail to select a multi-line segment of text, which is really annoying. Overall application is not that facts, the bootup takes a long time, and there is really no bleeding-edge technology utilised in it.

For yeas, I"ve been looking for a web-based smooth research software that help me ease these processes, unfortunately that does not exist yet.