Can you say more about you mean by "hierarchical" qualitative data analysis?
If the goal is to group sets of interviews according to different sets of criteria, all of the major qualitative data analysis programs have facilities to do this.
David L Morgan, thank you for your response. By hierarchical I meant grouping the interview responses into sub categories, categories and higher level concepts. I got your point.
There are nowadays several qualitative programs available. In our institution, we have signed Atlas.ti since we need to combine different languages - normally Chinese, Portuguese, and English - as well as data recorded in images and videos. The software works very well regardless of the amount of data that is inputted. Nonetheless, it requires training and mostly an open sharing of researchers' achievements and difficulties.
As far as I know, all the major QDA programs allow the grouping of codes into hierarchical subsets (sometimes called "families" as in parent and child codes). In my experience MAXQDA is especially easy to use in this regard.
I use R. I find it very useful for doing quantitative analysis of any biological data. There are many packages available in R for doing Hierarchical Clustering. Thanks and regards.
MAXQDA could be a good choice. Below is a full citation to a book providing guidance on strategies for utilizing MAXQDA for analyzing qualitative and mixed methods data.
Kuckartz, U., & Rädiker, S. (2019). Analyzing qualitative data with MAXQDA: Text, audio, and video. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-15671-8
I also recommend MAXQDA for its ease of creating hierarchical relationships among codes. They have several book length resources available for download at
I have used Atlas ti and found it user-friendly and can easily create a hierarchical network. We still need to have some manual analysis as the first step before auto coding or in vivo coding whatever system we use.
La Verne A Davis I personally think that NVivo is the Mercedes of qualitative data analysis marketing, but I don't think that what it actually does is much different from any of the other full-featured programs (e.g., ATLAS.ti, Dedoose, and MAXAQDA)