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.

Person classification with attributes 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 setup 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:

Different classifications for students and teachers displayed in List View.

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 in the Classifications group, click Case Classification.

  2. Enter the name of the classification—for example, Participant, Place or Site.
  3. In List View, right-click on the new classification and click New Attribute.
  4. Enter a name for the attribute. For example Age or Occupation.
  5. For Type, select the data type of the attribute values. For example. Age is an integer and Occupation is text.
  6. In the Attribute Values panel, click the plus sign to add attribute values. You can also add the values later in the classification sheet.

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 Auto Code Assistant. For example, when you:

  • Auto code 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 Education level.
  • Auto code 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.

Automatic coding in datasets