NVivo Starter Guide

Data Visualization

NVivo has several tools to help you visualize and explore your data, to organize your analysis, and to generate visualizations that can be included in a report.  Visualizations can be utilized throughout your research, but some tools are especially useful toward the beginning of work.  This section will review the chart types that are available.

Charts

Charts all for the visualization of aspects of your project and are useful both for exploration and for presentation.  Common applications include:

• Compare the coding for a particular file (proportion of document by code)
• Compare all of the files that are coded at a code or case (proportion of each file)
• Compare cases by attribute (age group, educational attainment, etc.

Mind maps are especially useful early in research, for example, when planning a coding schema.  In the example below, you can see a hierarchy of codes grouped into broad topics as well as a separate idea related to but unconnected to the coding schema.  NVivo allows you to add sibling or child nodes to create hierarchies of concepts and to convert these into nodes in your project.