Create case classifications

Case classifications let you store demographic information about the 'units of analysis' in your project.

For example, you could create cases for your interview participants, assign these cases to a classification called Person, and record values for Age, Gender,Level of Education and Occupation.

After you have done some coding, you can make comparisons based on these demographic attributes—for example, are there differences between how men and women respond to a particular issue?Crosstab query

Before you can set up the demographic data for your cases, you need to add one or more classifications to your project.

How many case classifications do I need?

You can create whatever classifications you need to support your analysis.

For example, your study may involve interviewing Students and Teachers (two groups with different sets of attributes). In this case, you could create two classifications:

Your project may involve comparing organizations, sites, places or other types of cases. You can create classifications to support the comparisons you want to make.

Create a case classification and add attributes

1. On the Create tab, click Case Classification.
2. Enter the name of the classification—for example, Participant, Place or Site.
3. Click Done.
4. Click Case Classifications in the Navigation View and select the new classification in the List View.
5. On the Home tab, click Case Classification > New Attribute.
6. Enter an attribute name (e.g. Age or Occupation) and optional description.
7. Select the data type of the attribute values in the Type field. For example. Age is an integer and Occupation is text.
8. If you know some of the attribute values you can add them now (you can easily add additional values later, as needed). Click the plus sign at the bottom of the Attribute Values panel. For example—for Occupation, you could add Fisher and Teacher.

You can now assign cases to the new classification and define the attribute values for each case.

Create case classifications from datasets

You can also set up case classifications when you use the Autocode Assistant. For example, when you:

• Autocode and classify a dataset containing survey responses, you can choose to create a new case classification with attributes from your closed-ended survey questions, such as Age or Occupation.
• Autocode a dataset containing social media data (imported from NCapture files) and choose to code by Username, NVivo creates cases with the classification 'Facebook User' or 'Twitter User'. Information from the user's profile is stored as attribute values for each code.

Autocode datasets