Organize demographic data

If your research involves interacting with people to gather their ideas or opinions, you will probably want to keep track of their demographic attributes (like age or gender) and use these as a basis for comparison. This page explains how to set up demographic data depending on the types of file you are working with.

Manage demographic data using case classifications

You use NVivo's case classifications to record descriptive information about the people or participants in your project. Although this page focuses on people, you could also use case classifications to record descriptive information about institutions and places.

NVivo provides quick ways to organize your demographic data and the steps vary depending on the type of files you are working with. In general, you need to:

• Make a case for each participant.
• Classify the case as a person—you could also have classifications for different types of people, like students or teachers.
• Assign the attributes—for example, age group and gender.
• Code participants' comments to their cases.

After setting up cases and coding your data, your project may look something like this:

Set up demographic data for interview participants

If you have a document for each interview, you can:

1. Import the interviews into NVivo—make sure the document names reflect the names you use to identify the interview participants.
2. Create a case for each participant and code their interview to the case—to do this quickly, select all the interviews in the List View, right-click and then select Create As > Create as Cases.

   

3. Prepare your spreadsheet for import. If you do not have a spreadsheet of demographic data, you can create this data directly in NVivo (refer to Classify cases). Format your spreadsheet so that:
   • Participant names are identical to the cases you created in NVivo.
   • The top-left cell of the spreadsheet contains the classification name Person.
4. Import the spreadsheet—on the Import tab, in the Classifications group, click Classification Sheet. On Step 2 of the Import Classification Sheets Wizard, make sure you choose Case Classification from the Classification type list.  

   The Person classification sheet is created and displayed  in Detail View—you can sort, filter or export  the classification sheet and you can edit the attribute values.

   Classification sheets

Set up demographic data for focus group participants

If you have focus group documents with a number of participants you can:

1. Import the focus group documents into NVivo.
2. Create a case for each participant and code their comments at the case—to do this quickly, you can autocode the documents by speaker.
3. Set up the demographic attributes for your participants—refer to Classify cases. An efficient way to do this is to import the demographic details from a text file or spreadsheet. You can prepare your spreadsheet so that:
   • Participant names match the names of the cases you created in NVivo.
   • The top-left cell of the spreadsheet contains the classification name Person.

     

4. Import the spreadsheet—on the Import tab, in the Classifications group, click Classification Sheet. On Step 2 of the Import Classification Sheets Wizard, make sure you choose Case Classification from the Classification type list.

   The Person classification sheet is created and displayed  in Detail View—you can click in a cell to assign or create new attribute values.

Set up demographic data for social media participants

If you have captured data from Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube—you can use autocoding to create cases for the participants (for example. Twitter users) and assign biographical information such as occupation or location.

For ideas on approaches to working with social media datasets, refer to Twitter data.

Use demographic data in queries and visualizations

Once you set up the demographic data for your research participants, you can use queries and visualizations to make comparisons. For example, you could use a matrix coding query to compare attitudes about environment and community based on gender—this matrix displays the number of coding references at each intersection and helps you to answer questions like How often did women mention community? (you can double-click in a cell to see the coded content).

 

If you would rather ask the question How many women talked about community? you can change the count that is displayed in the matrix—right-click and select Cell Content, then click Cases Coded, and then click the classification Person.

 

You could also create a chart to explore the demographic spread of your respondents—for example, you may want to check the representation of ages in coding for the code Natural Environment:

 

Find out more about queries and charts.