INSIDE ATLAS.ti - Newsletter October 2014
Fellow coders,
This issue's guest article comes from Ricardo Contreras, our Director for Training & Partnership Development. It is the first in a series which will periodically highlight important features and tools in ATLAS.ti. We will focus on features that are sometimes overlooked or under-utilized, and will break them down to their basic steps and emphasize important aspects.
Through our training programs and webinars — many of them are available free of charge— we are always in touch with our users. Besides sharing their expertise, our trainers listen closely and address your common questions and concerns.
This newsletter’s feature article will look at Primary Document Families. Users often tend to postpone this type of document organization until the later stages of the analysis process — and sometimes even ignore this step altogether. We get it, diving right into coding is very satisfying. However, it unnecessarily limits the potential for a good analysis and prevents you from using the software’s full capabilities.
Have a look. I hope you can use these tips in your current project.
Kind regards & happy coding,
Jörg Hecker
Director of Business Operations
ATLAS.ti
NEWS
Free group demonstrations
If your organization is in the process of evaluating ATLAS.ti for a multi-user or campus license, or if you would like to introduce it to your students in class, schedule a FREE one-hour software demo through web-conferencing. Interested? Contact us at trainingcenter@atlasti.com.
New schedule for free introductory webinars
Check out the new schedule for our FREE 60-minute webinars that introduce ATLAS.ti for Win and ATLAS.ti for Mac OS X (available in English and Spanish). In these webinars, the instructors introduce the software and its fundamental features, and answer participants’ questions. They are scheduled conveniently for timezones in Asia/Pacific, Americas, Europe, and Africa. Want to register for these webinars? Sign up at atlasti.com/training/free-training/.
Read & contribute: Our research blog is very active
On our blog, you’ll find articles from researchers across the world and all disciplines. They share how they work with ATLAS.ti: research applications, interesting approaches to analysis, lessons learned. Check it out: www.blog.atlasti.com. — If you have something to share with the international community of ATLAS.ti users, please contact us at blog@atlasti.com and we will publish your post.
FEATURE ARTICLE
Primary Document Families: An Essential Procedure That Facilitates Data Exploration and Analysis
by Ricardo B. Contreras
Director Training & Partnership Development, ATLAS.ti
In this article, I will discuss primary document family (PD family) organization in ATLAS.ti for Windows. Appropriate document organization is crucial for an optimal data analysis process with ATLAS.ti. You will hear about PD families as a concept, the process of creating families manually as well as the process of importing families from a spreadsheet, and the role of Super PD families.
Why should you pay attention to Primary Document Families?
In my experience as a trainer, I have noticed that people often go directly into coding; ignoring aspects related to document organization. Although coding is no doubt a fulfilling process, it might not always be a good idea to rush into it without first paying attention to initial organizational tasks. By skipping these tasks, the potential for an effective data exploration and analysis process is unnecessarily restricted.
Primary Document Families: What are they?
Primary Document Families are groups of a project’s documents that represent attributes relevant for analysis. For instance, if it is relevant to analyze the data across the age of participants, their gender and ethnicity, or according to the site of data collection, then it makes sense to group the project documents in families according to those attributes. Please note that one document can be a member of multiple families and deleting a family does not affect the integrity of the documents that belong to it.
While families can be created at any time during the analysis process, I recommend that you create PD families early in your project. They will allow you to start interrogating your data across documents early on — normally a good idea since qualitative data analysis normally follows an iterative rather than lineal process. Once you have created your PD families, you can interrogate your project in different ways, such as:
Using the Code Co-occurrence Tree and Table: In what context did the women interviewed in the Eternal Springtime neighborhood discuss access to public transportation? Did they associate access to public transportation with economics, culture, or politics? If so, what is the meaning behind those associations? How many times did they associate those concepts with each other?
Having a good PD family system facilitates the formulation of questions such as these because it allows data exploration across groups of participants and documents. A good primary document family system will allow you to set the stage for effective data exploration and analysis. Start early on, ideally as you set up your project.
Although your documents can be organized in multiple ways according to their characterizing attributes, not all of those attributes might be relevant from an analytical point of view. That is why I recommend that you begin by determining what is and what is not relevant for you. A table like the one below can help.
Figure 1. Table to organize thoughts on document organization
Please note: In the name of the PD family, each attribute is separated from its value with a double colon (::), e.g. “Gender::Female.” This nomenclature facilitates the process of importing and exporting PD family tables from and to spreadsheets.
How to create PD families manually
In the Primary Document Manager (PD Manager), select a set of documents and drag and drop them into the “Families” side panel. Once you drop the documents there, a window opens up and that is where you write down the name of the family. For example, “Site::Sunnyside.”
Figure 2. Creating PD families in the PD Manager
Once the PD families have been created, you can see them in the PD Manager. If you select one of the families in the side panel, the documents that belong to it will be shown on the right hand side, as follows:
Figure 3. List of documents by family in PD Manager
How to import a primary document table from a spreadsheet
If you prefer to enter characterizing attributes into a spreadsheet rather than manually in ATLAS.ti, you can import your spreadsheet. This will automatically create the PD families of your project. I recommend that you first export the primary document structure, open the spreadsheet and then enter the document attributes. Finally, import the spreadsheet (complete with document attributes) back to ATLAS.ti. As a result, the project documents will be automatically grouped into families according to the attributes specified in the spreadsheet. See below the three steps to follow.
Step 1. Export the PD family table
After the documents have been added to the project, the primary document table can be exported as either a comma/semicolon-separated value (CSV) file or a tab-delimited (XLS) file, both of which can be read by Excel and OpenOffice Calc. See below.
Figure 4. Export the PD family table
Step 2. Add the document attributes to spreadsheet
Once you have exported your PD table, you can enter attributes and their values directly into the spreadsheet:
See the figure below.
Figure 5. Spreadsheet with document attributes
Step 3. Import the PD family table
Next, import the table into ATLAS.ti. As a result, you will be able to see the PD families in the PD Manager. Note that if you need to import new families later, just export the table again, insert the additional data, and re-import it. The figures below show the menu to import the PD family table and the families already created and shown in the PD Manager.
Figure 6. Importing the PD family table
Figure 7. PD families imported from spreadsheet
Please note: This is not the only way to import PD families from spreadsheets. Instead of starting by exporting the original primary document structure, as I suggest in this article, you may decide to start by creating the spreadsheet from scratch and then importing it. However, I think that starting by exporting the spreadsheet with the PD family structure is easier and safer since you avoid making mistakes in the way columns and documents are named. (Pages 245-248 of the ATLAS.ti manual describe the PD family table importation process.
How to work with Super PD families
Super PD families allow you to further group your documents by combining families using Boolean operators. For example, if you want to explore what women from the Sunnyside neighborhood had to say about accessing public transportation, you would combine the “Site::Sunnyside” family with the “Gender::Female” family using the AND Boolean operator. (The AND Boolean operator retrieves the data that lies at the intersection of two subsets, in this case “Sunnyside neighborhood” and “Women”).
As ATLAS.ti allows you to combine families you need to only think about the very basic attributes that characterize your documents when you create PD families. Do not try to create families that represent all their possible combinations. Super document families can be created in two ways: in the PD Manager, using the Venn diagram symbol and in the Super Document Family Manager. The steps to them in the PD Manager are as follows:
The figure below depicts these steps:
Creating PD super families in the PD Manager
Alternatively, you may create super document families using the Super Family Tool, which can be accessed through the PD Family. Through this tool, PD families can be combined using the OR, AND, XOR (Exclusively OR), and the NOT Boolean operators. The figures below depict the process of creating super document families in the Super Family Tool.
Accessing the Super Family Tool
Figure 8. Super PD family
For a detailed description of families in ATLAS.ti, read this manual section.
My best wishes for your analysis.
