Queries
Queries help you to explore your data and investigate hunches as you progress through your project. You can:
- Find and analyze the words or phrases in your files and nodes.
- Ask questions and find patterns based on your coding and check for coding consistency among team members.
Create quick and simple queries to get a sense of what is happening in the data, or build detailed queries for a more focused perspective. Move forward with queries visualizations
What are the different queries?
Query | Description | Examples |
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Find all occurrences of a word, phrase, or concept. |
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Find the most frequently occurring words or concepts. |
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Find all content coded at selected nodes, a combination of nodes, or a combination of nodes and attributes. |
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Find the coding intersections or co-occurrence of themes in your project and display this in a matrix. |
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Check how coding is distributed across the cases, or different types of cases in your project. |
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Use a compound query to
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Compare coding done by two users or two groups of users. This query measures the 'inter-rater reliability' or the degree of agreement for coding done by selected users. |
Compare coding between users in different locations or from different disciplines who are coding the same data in order to check the consistency of their coding. |
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Find items that are associated in a particular way with other items. The items could be associated by coding, attribute value, relationships, 'see also' links or maps. |
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Create a query
On the Explore tab, in the Query group, click the icon for the query you want to create.
For detailed information on creating different types of queries, refer to the following pages:
- Text Search query
- Compound query
- Word frequency query
- Coding comparison query
- Coding query
- Group query
- Matrix coding query
- Crosstab query
Query results are discarded when you close your project. You can add the query to your project to run again, and you can save the results of some queries. Manage query results
Create a query with dynamic scope
When you create a query that you want to run at regular intervals—for example, a Coding query to see how your coding is evolving—it is a good idea to use a Search Folder as the scope of your query.
Search Folders contain items that currently meet specified search criteria—as your project changes, the items in the Search Folder change too.
For example, you could create a Search Folder that contains only files in the file classification Interview, and use the Search Folder as the scope of a coding query. Every time you run the query, only files that meet the Search Folder's criteria (have the classification Interview) will be in scope.