The following section includes a brief summary of the various types of data queries that may be conducted in NVivo.  Linked to this page are additional pages that show "how" to conduct the various listed data queries.  

This feature enables users to locate particular words, phrases, equations, and concepts (data "strings") within any of the contents in the NVivo project.  

This feature enables a machine-based "summary" of the main ideas (albeit without sentiment or direction) of an NVivo project (and any of its subsets of folders, nodes, text corpuses, and datasets, etc.) by the culling of popularly used (mostly semantic) words.  

This feature enables the identification of intersecting coded information, such as overlaps between particular nodes and concepts, and intersections of contents coded to particular nodes. This may also enable the culling of subsets of data based on particular attribute values. For example, this would enable the collecting of responses based on respondent characteristics, such as all (survey, interview, focus group, Delphi study, or other aspect) respondents who fit within certain subsets (gender, age, socio-economic status / SES, or other categories or descriptors).  

Matrix coding enables the search for shared occurrences of data or concepts across node-based variables, folders, sources, or other objects.  

A coding comparison enables those in a research team to compare how multiple coders or multiple teams of coders coded to a particular node.  This may be used to help in “norming” coding (raising inter-rater reliability), promoting discussions of coding among the team, and / or developing or evolving a shared codebook (and shared understandings around coding with a codebook).  

A compound query enables the identification of certain terms that are in relationship to other terms, with relationships such as the following:  "AND," "OR," "AND NOT," "NEAR Content," "PRECEDING CONTENT," and "SURROUNDING Content".  These relational connectors enable the finding of targeted and precise contents.  This is an advanced type of query.  The text searches may be done across types of contents (whether documents and codes or others). This query then enables fine-grained queries for particular data by a researcher who is quite familiar with his / her / their dataset.  

The group data query enables users to find items associated in defined / particular ways with other items.  The associational definitions may include “coding, attribute value, relationships,” and others.  (Some of this functionality may be viewed visually in the links or models functions.  Many such groupings may remain "invisible" or "latent" to researchers until these are extracted.  

Readers may follow the path below in order to get the specifics on the various ways to conduct the data queries.  Or they may continue along the sequential book path. 



To gain a sense of some of the matrix queries in NVivo, the downloadable slideshow "Matrix Queries in NVivo 10" may be helpful. 

To access queries that were saved, in the Navigation View (bottom left), go to Queries. Above that section, go to the proper folder (Queries or Results), and double click.  Select the desired results from the List View, and double click. 

Any matrix coding results will be available in either a matrix format or a chart (data visualization) format (in the Detail View area).  

The idea behind a macro is that complex scripts that will be re-used do not have to be rewritten every time.  Rather, it is possible to just call up the macro and apply it to the new data or to the original data set and additional collected data.