The only way we could do this was by very basic trial and error. We agreed to work together to try to resolve the problems and see if we could come up with a format that would be consistently compatible with NVivo. We discussed the matter with an established client who uses our transcription services regularly – sometimes for NVivo analysis and sometimes not. We decided that we needed to be able to offer a service where we could guarantee that a transcription would be compatible with NVivo and therefore needed to get to the bottom of the problem and work out why certain files would work well with NVivo and other very similar documents would not work well at all. However, the number of clients contacting us and mentioning NVivo was steadily increasing as research budgets were being squeezed and researchers had to find efficient ways to analyse interviews with limited time and resources. The results were so inconsistent that when a new client would contact us asking for a transcription for the specific purpose of using with NVivo, we felt unable to give any kinds of guarantees and had to warn them that the process was fraught with difficulties. So, for example, we would have one researcher asking us to transcribe an interview and say that it needed to be in the table form to work and another would say the complete opposite. Secondly, the people contacting us were never quite sure why the documents they had attempted to analyse had failed. At other times the process has gone smoothly and documents have been uploaded and analysed perfectly.
We have been contacted many times because researchers have had interviews transcribed (either by us or other firms) ready to upload into NVivo only to find that the software has failed to analyse the document properly. Firstly, whilst PDF, Word and Excel documents are compatible with NVivo, we have discovered from our dealings with clients that the results are very inconsistent. There were two main challenges that came with these requests. Clients have approached us asking for audio and video interviews to be transcribed into documents that are compatible with NVivo. Audio and video files of interviews can be uploaded directly into NVivo, but using PDF, Word or Excel documents in NVivo can be more cost effective. NVivo helps qualitative researchers to organize, analyse and find insights in unstructured or qualitative data like interviews where deep levels of analysis on small or large volumes of data are required. We have been approached by many clients recently who use the NVivo qualitative data analysis computer software package. Click here for Case Study 2 – Public Health Wales.