Using NVivo for such a small dataset would be a bit like trying to crack a nut with a piledriver. Also it's not cheap. I'm not familiar with Dedoose, but I have heard very good things about Quirkos for small-study data analysis, so you might want to check that out too (apologies if I'm complicating rather than simplifying your life). Good luck!

Thanks, Helen.

All of the qualitative data analysis software packages involve a learning curve, and while some people do say that NVivo takes longer to learn than others, I doubt if the difference is all that large.

One potentially important difference is expense, you buy NVivo but pay for Dedoose on an hourly basis. You might also look at the basic version of QDA Miner which lacks bells and whistles, but is free. All of these programs have video tutorials on their websites, so you can get a sense of what it is like to use them.

As for doing the analysis by hand versus using software, I personally would see your project size as in the range where the software might indeed be helpful. The main issue would be keeping track of your coding and finding patterns within that coding, which can be challenging when you have 17 sources of data.

Thanks, David.

One important thing about Dedoose is that you work in the Cloud, so it encourages collaborative work (even simultaneously). Plus, it is cheaper than all of the "good" qualitative daya analysis software.

I use NViVo for the 6 months, I never get the hang of using it. Then I discovered Dedoose and it's much cheaper than NVivo. I have small participants as well, only 11 but I have 4 (individual and dialogue interview, participant observation and photovoice data sources, it will be interesting how Dedoose going to handle it.

Hi Colm, I was wondering which one you decided on, as I'm currently thinking of buying Quirkos

 I would be interested to hear any comparisons of Quirkos versus Dedoose as I am weighing them up against each other for a piece of research with 400 participants.

I'm actually one of the designers of Quirkos, but hope I can answer some of these questions. The main advantage of Dedoose over Quirkos is that it is cloud based - which makes it much easier to work with a team of people, especially when some are not in the same department. It also has much better filtering and mixed-method analysis tools when working with large project (like 400 participants) so I would always recommend Dedoose for projects of this size. As Dedoose is subscription based, the initial financial outlay is very low.

I would say that Quirkos is easier to learn, and people find the interface more intuitive. However, this is partly because it has fewer features to display. Quirkos has a more traditional one-off licence fee, but this does not expire, so once you have Quirkos you own it for good. Both have a free trial and short video tutorials, and I always suggest people try a few packages to see what works best for them and their project!

I use both, below are my impressions, hope it helps, cheers.

Dedoose

• Pros: it is simpler, much easier to collaborate with (cloud based) and is payable on a monthly use basis,
• Cons : since it is browser based, can get slow and crash, also although you can easily modify your coding tree to create sub codes, in context, it is difficult to split a code, once the excerpt is coded you can relabel it as something else but not easily break it into smaller coded excerpts. I feel this lack of in-text flexibility could potentialy impact your analysis as it makes it harder to evolve from your initial, first cycle coding tree.

Nvivo

• Pros: you can sub code excerpts (lump and detail) including from within -soon to be- parent code excerpts, or on the other hand merge codes (split and gather) at will. the software is computer based, no lagging, very rare crashing.
• Cons: it is expensive (easily worth 20 months of Dedoose subscription), the learning curve is longuer, it is difficult to collaborate with, but not impossible (you either need to coordinate coders to regularily export and then you gather and consolidate NVP files, or have access to Nvivo servers/ Nvivo for teams which is very expensive-in the thousands USD per year).

in brief, it depends: the shorter the analysis timeframe, the more collaborative= Dedoose; the longuer the analysis timeframe, the less collaborative (i.e. PhD thesis)=Nvivo

I would echo many of the comments already made in this thread, and we use Dedoose for the following reasons:

I have experience in both and use Dedoose currently. Dedoose will do most of the actions Nvivo offers. The friendly user interface might be a plus for Nvivo although Dedoose will cost less. Dedoose also offers a lot of great tutorials and clear instructions on their website.

I realise I am late to the party, but I need to ask why was no one is bringing up Atlas.ti?

We looked at Atlas.ti a while back, and it's been significantly upgraded since then.

Recent reports suggest it is easier to use than it used to be (had a cluttered UI), and now has cloud plus Mac added to platform options.

The biggest hurdle is the price - it's absurdly expensive a a commercial licence, which effectively rules out all freelance researchers and SMEs from using it - £1380 for a single user licence?!!

However, for students, they offer deep discounts, as does Nvivo, and that's an attractive deal if you're in education. I guess the idea is to get people hooked early. However, I don't know of any commercial agencies using Atlas, so I'm not convinced it's working! Nyamwaya Munthali

I am a big fan of Dedoose. It was developed by actual researchers at UCLA (where I went to grad school and used the beta versions that eventually became Dedoose). The reporting tools are more useful and easier to use in Dedoose. It is cloud-based (and super secure, even for my federally-funded projects), so you can use it from any computer. You don't need a license or to pay for the next version - it just gets better with time and you get the best version all the time! It works in multiple languages, accepts tons of forms of media, and you can easily enter your demographic information so you can look at all your results by whatever variable of interest (e.g. race/ethnicity, geography, income, gender). The inter-rater reliability tool is great. If you are working with a partner who wants to, say review your coding, they would have to get the expensive NVivo software too and sharing it would be hard. It is really easy to share on Dedoose. They also have a great sticky notes feature where you can pose questions to your team, say about getting the right coding somewhere, or if you need an additional code to capture a variation on a topic. Dedoose has great online tutorials. Just watch a few videos!

Good luck!

I adopted Dedoose as a trial version and intended to use it based on a recommendation, but I had a simple question stemming from a landing page on their website that is not very informative. I called customer support and got a VM directing me to send an email. The email was not returned for 9 hours. In the meantime I switched to Quirkos, because I wanted to get started.