Organize demographic data

If your research involves interacting with people to gather their ideas or opinions, you will probably want to keep track of their demographic attributes (like age or gender) and use these as a basis for comparison. This page explains how to set up demographic data depending on the types of file you are working with.

Manage demographic data using case classifications

You use NVivo's case classifications to record descriptive information about the people or participants in your project. Although this page focuses on people, you could also use case classifications to record descriptive information about institutions and places.

NVivo provides quick ways to organize your demographic data and the steps vary depending on the type of files you are working with. In general, you need to:

• Make a case for each participant.
• Classify the case as a person—you could also have classifications for different types of people, like students or teachers.
• Assign the attributes—for example, age group and gender.
• Code participants' comments to their cases.

After setting up cases and coding your data, your project may look something like this:

Set up demographic data for interview participants

If you have a document for each interview, you can:

1. Import the interviews into NVivo—make sure the document names reflect the names you use to identify the interview participants.
2. Create a case for each participant and code their interview to the case—to do this quickly, select all the interviews in the List View, right-click and then select Create As > Create As Cases and assign them to the person classification.

   

3. In Navigation view, click Classifications and then click Case Classifications. In List view, double-click the Person classification to open the classification sheet. You can then enter the values for each attribute. If you have this demographic data in a text file, you can import it. Classification sheets

If you are working with a focus group, you can manually create a case for each participant, then code their content at the case and set their attribute values in the classification sheet.

Set up demographic data for survey respondents

In a spreadsheet of survey results, demographic data is usually contained in the rows or columns.

To set up the demographic data in NVivo manually, do the following:

1. Import the survey dataset into NVivo.
2. Use the Autocode Assistant to create, classify and code to cases representing each of the respondents. Autocode datasets

Use demographic data in queries and visualizations

Once you set up the demographic data for your research participants, you can use queries and visualizations to make comparisons. For example, you could use a matrix coding query to compare attitudes about environment and community based on gender—this matrix displays the number of coding references at each intersection and helps you to answer questions like How often did women mention community? (you can double-click in a cell to see the coded content).

If you would rather ask the question How many women talked about community? you can change the count that is displayed in the matrix—right-click and select Cell Content, then click Cases Coded, and then click the classification Person.