Identifying speaker in focus group transcriptions (not video or audio)

[Andrea1987]

Hi, I hope someone could help me.My project involved runing focus groups. When I code themes I would like them to link to the person who speak.  I have named people in my focus group transcripts (word documents) as follows, Person1, Person 2 etc. How can I link the words with the person, so that later on I could see what has person1 said about the node X? It seems to only be able to do it with classifications if each document is a person, as in an interview or if you have a video where you can add a column to indicate the person that is speaking in each moment.

Can anyone help me? thanks!

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Andrea,

Yes you can link to people/cases as you say but you need to understand the concept of the 'case node' and create cases in your NVivo project properly linked to demographics/profiling information if you have recorded such information against your participants. 

To understand case nodes (units of observation and analysis):

Fist take  a look at his video which explains the concept:

http://www.qdatraining.eu/content/tutorial-2-where-are-my-case-nodes-and-casebook-gone-nvivo-9-or-10

However, focus groups differ from one-to-one interviews as you have multiple cases in a source document. We must use the auto-coding option to create the cases from focus groups. See this video to understand formatting focus groups for auto-coding. Although this video uses Word for formatting, you can do this in NVivo if you have already begun coding and don't want to re-import your interviews after formatting:

http://www.qdatraining.eu/content/auto-code-focus-groups-cases-link-demographics

Let me know if this makes sense or if you need more help

 

Kind regards,

The QDATRAINING Team

[Andrea1987]

Dear Ben,

thank you for your answer, but when I tried to watch the second video that I am sure that it could help me a lot, it said "page not found". Can you try it again please?

Thanks

Andrea

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Andrea,

Sorry, there was an error in the link. It's working now:

http://www.qdatraining.eu/content/auto-code-focus-groups-cases-link-demographics 

[Andrea1987]

Thank you Ben. But your solution does not work for me. My transcriptions are something like that:

Moderator: ok, so the issue that we are going to speak about is prostitution. Whoever can "break the ice"

Person1: Ok, I think is not an easy question, but I have a strong opinion about that

Person2:women who practise prostitution are extremelly poor and they need the money

Person3:but the problem is about men…

I mean, I do not have specific questions, they speak freely about the topic. So, I do not know how can identify the people so that I can add them sociodemographic information and later on see how they discourse has changed. Do you have any idea?

Thank you very much

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Andrea,

Your focus group is typical of most. You simply apply the heading style to your people. So your transcript should look like this:

Person 1: (Heading Style 2)

Ok, I think is not an easy question, but I have a strong opinion about that

Person 2: (Heading Style 2)

women who practice prostitution are extremely poor and they need the money

Person 3: (Heading Style 2)

but the problem is about men…

You can format manually or use find and replace in NVivo to automate the formatting. To do this:

1. Open your focus group document in NVivo:
2. Click on the 'edit' link at the top of the document
3. In the hoe tab, click on 'replace'
4. In the 'find what' text box type the participant ID: Person 1 for example
5. In the 'replace with type 'Person 1^p' and in the style box chose 'Heading 2' from the drop down menu
6. Tick the boxes 'match case' & 'find whole words' 
7. Click on 'replace all 

'NVivo will now convert your person 1 entries from:

Person 1: Ok, I think is not an easy question, but I have a strong opinion about that

TO

Person 1: (Heading Style 2)

Ok, I think is not an easy question, but I have a strong opinion about that

Repeat these steps for each participant and then you can create case nodes linked to profiling information in NVivo for all focus group participants. In other words, you can give everyone a unique identity in your study even though they are coming from the same transcript. 

Let me know if this worked for you or of you need more help.

Kind regards,

 

 

[Andrea1987]

Thank you for your response. It is very useful, but I have a problem. I am trying to do it, but there is no change in the style of the text, so I am not able to do the autocode. I wrote in the replace style folder: heading 2, but there is no change when I replace it. Do you have any suggestion of what could happen?

Thank you very much

Kind regards.

Andrea

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Andrea,

This could be related to moving the original through different versions of MS Word. Here is what to do:

1. Open one the focus group documents
2. Click on the edit button at the top of the document
3. Select one of the speakers 
4. Manually format it to heading style 2 (in the 'home' tab, change the style from whatever it is currently displaying to Heading 2)
5. Re-run the replace option and it will work

The purpose of this exercise is to advise NVivo what Heading 2 should like in this version of Word. Once you have manually formatted one heading, everything else will work fine. 

Let me know if this worked okay for you?

Kind regards,

[Andrea1987]

Thank you! I think that works. I will try during this days and if I have any doubts I will write you again. Thank you so much for your valuable help.

Kind regards

Andrea

[roblowney]

Hi Ben

I have the same issue as the other people in this thread. I have reformatted my focus group transcript with Heading 2 identifying each speaker. However, I am using Nvivo for Mac which does not support auto coding of paragraph styles/headings. How can I ensure codes from the transcript are linked to the individual speakers?

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Rob,

As you have seen, not all Windows features are available yet in NVivo for MAC.

The simplest solution is to move the project file to a Windows PC, run the auto coder to create the cases and export the file from there as MAC file. You can then move back into the MAC environment with all your cases working.

The only other alternative is to manually code your cases from the transcripts but would only be used if you had no access to a Windows machine. 

Hope this was helpful but let me know if it's not making sense and I'll post more detail.

[roblowney]

Hi Ben

 

Thanks for your speedy reply. I installed Nvivo for Windows on a Windows PC and transferred my Mac project there. I followed the instructions on this webpage: http://help-nv10.qsrinternational.com/desktop/deep_concepts/work_with_your_projects_on_windows_or_mac.htm#MiniTOCBookMark8 to convert the Mac project (.nvpx file) to Windows format but I cannot get past Step 3.

 

When I open the Mac project I get an error message saying "The project cannot be opened. It was created in a later version of Nvivo'. Both my Mac and Windows versions of Nvivo are fully up to date – version 10.2.0 on Mac and version 10.0.638.0 SP6 32-bit on Windows.

 

Have you any advice as to how I can proceed?

 

Many thanks
Rob

 

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