Working with MAXQDA – Episode 3
Posted by Lance Gravlee on December 14th, 2008 in Text | 20 Comments »
Here is the third installment in the video tutorial series on working with MAXQDA. This episode focuses on how to include information about the attributes of your data sources in MAXQDA.
The tutorial project uses a set of oral history transcripts from the Civil Rights Documentation Project at the University of Southern Mississippi. If you’d like to follow along with the tutorial, you can download the oral history transcripts and the attributes file here.
Working with MAXQDA – 3 from Lance Gravlee on Vimeo.
The version of the video embedded here from Vimeo is relatively low resolution. If you have a high-speed Internet connection, you may prefer to view the high-resolution version.
I invite your feedback. Please leave a comment to post your questions or suggestions about how to make the tutorials more useful.
20 Responses
This is clear, concise and immensely helpful. What an efficient way to share information! Thanks for taking the time to do this, Dr. Gravlee!
I’m trying MAXQDA for 30 days, you pieces here are very helpful and look forward to future ones.
Thanks for the positive feedback, Nikki and Don. More tutorials are on the way. What aspects of using the software would you most like to see to get up and running?
Hi Dr. Gravlee, I happened on your website after reading Lewis and Silver’s book, “Using Software in Qualitative Research”. I am almost finished my interviews (30) and given my research, I feel that MAXQDA may be an excellent choice. I thank you very much for both your talent and time in producing these tutorials and I await your further tutorials.
Thanks once again,
Ann
Your tutorial is great! I wish I could keep watching other episodes.
I have encountered a problem which the online support staff could not figure out. I wonder if you have ever experienced a similar problem. I will try to explain as clearly as I can.
First, I color code my text. Second, I edit the color coded text (e.g., correct a typo) . Third, I decide that I want to delete all of the color codes. Then, I find out that not all of the codes can be deleted. Any codes above the corrections (edits) will be deleted. However, any codes below the corrections (edits) will remain (icons will be gone, but highlights stay).
Is this issue unique to me? Or, have you ever had this issue? The only solution for this problem that I know is to stop editing after coding. I wish I could understand this problem.
@Miki: Thanks for the feedback on the tutorials. I hope to post the next episode within a few weeks.
I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to your problem with color-coded text. I have seen something similar: sometimes when deleting color codes, the highlighting remains in place. It seems to go away only after opening a different document and then coming back to the document with the deleted codes.
Let’s hope the folks at MAXQDA can figure out what’s happening behind the scenes!
Dear Prof. Gravlee,
Thank you very much for the MAXQDA video tutorials, I watched them with great pleasure. I can only agree with what the previous commentors said. They are really well-made: well-structured, concise and easy to grasp. I am really looking forward to watching the episodes 4 – 10 already outlined on your homepage.
Thanks for all your efforts and please keep up the good work.
Regards,
Christoph Burger, Vienna, Austria
Thank you for the tutorials! I am eagerly awaiting #4.
[...] with the interface (7:59) • Importing, Creating, Editing and Organizing Texts (9:28) and • Attributes (17:53). Keep checking back as new episodes are on the [...]
Thanks Dr. Gravlee for your tutorials. I am looking forward to the next ones but could you please provide some guidance on how to cite the results in a paper…any books I can consult? Thank you.
When can we anticipate the next installments?
Great work!! I wish we had this for all software.
Let me add my voice – these are wonderful tutorials and I eagerly await more installments. I’d say breathlessly, but that could be dangerous.
I hope that you find the time and resources to continue with this wonderful service.
Thank you so much for your detailed explanation on how we can utilize the power of MAXQDA!! Even if I have been using MAXQDA2007 for two years, I did not use the attribute functions so far. Your tutorial is just GREAT!!!
Thanks to all of you for your kind words about the tutorials. I’m glad they’ve been helpful. More episodes are on the way — but not until the new version of MAXQDA is released this spring. Once I have a chance to play with MAXQDA 10, I’ll update the series to incorporate the latest features.
Thanks a lot for your helpfull tutorials! I really appreciate these online instruction video’s. I wonder if the rest of the video’s (4-10) can be seen soon. So, that I can use it for my research about the meaning of indeterminate spaces in Berlin.
Hi Lance, this is a great tutorial. I have been giving some workshops in Canada on MAXQDA (fadaconsulting@gmail.com) and I always recommend your on-line tutorials at the end of the workshop. A couple of questions:
1. I understand you are working on a tutorial for the new version (10). Will MAXQDA keep these tutorials on-line for those who may continue to use version 2007? I hope both copies will be kept online. If not, is there a way, at all, for people to download your video of the 2007 version tutorials?
2. Have you tried importing or exporting attributes into/from SPSS? It looks so easy in the program you have used in your tutorial, but I can’t figure out how to do it with SPSS, which is the program I use for quantitative analysis. The problem I am having is with using SPSS, not MAXQDA. I know how to use SPSS in general but I don’t know how to import/export txt files.
Some specific issues: When I try to export a file from SPSS into MAXQDA, it only allows me to save with extension “.cvs”, which you said is sometimes problematic. It won’t allow me to save as “.txt”. Then, for importing, I can open a txt file from MAXQDA into SPSS, but I don’t know how to follow the instructions to make the file work in SPSS.
Thanks for the feedback, Aine. I’m glad you’ve found the tutorials helpful. On your questions:
1. I plan to start posting videos for MAXQDA 10 this summer, but I will leave the existing one for MAXQDA 2007 online. My plan is to migrate the videos to the newly redesigned QualQuant.org. When that happens, I’ll post an announcement here.
2. I left SPSS in favor of Stata a few years ago, so I’m not familiar with the current export options in SPSS. You mentioned that you’re able to export a comma-separated value (CSV) file, though. Have you tried importing that file to MAXQDA? If it doesn’t work right away, you can open the CSV file in your spreadsheet software (e.g., Excel, OpenOffice Calc) and edit it to meet MAXQDA’s import format. I suggest you start by exporting the attribute table from MAXQDA to make sure you start with the correct format. Then, open the exported file in your spreadsheet software. You can cut-and-paste your data from the SPSS file and re-save in the same format MAXQDA exported. You should be ready to import back into MAXQDA then. Let me know how it goes — lots of other readers are probably interested in the solution, too.
Hi Lance,
MAXQDA won’t open the .csv file. The only file it will open up is a .txt file. I’ve figured out that I can save my SPSS file as an excel file and then save the excel file as a .txt file that can then be opened up in MAXQDA.
Still having trouble figuring out how to get a .txt file to open up properly in SPSS, but maybe that’s an SPSS problem I need to figure out. The SPSS screenshots in the current MAXQDA manual for doing this are different from what I am seeing in my program (version 15).
Aine
MAXQDA has helped me figure out why I was having difficulty exporting an attribute file from MAXQDA to SPSS (version 15, but apparently this also happens with version 18, and presumably other versions). When exporting, I have to say “no” when it asks me if I want to unicode the data.
Aine
Dear Lance
Great tutorials! Please post more.
:-)
M.