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11. Cases

Imagine cases as a suitcase in which you collect all the information about a person, an organization, a location, an event or other entities that represent the focus of your research. You can attach your cases to classification sheets to record descriptive information about the cases in your project. So if your case is a person, perhaps you want to capture demographic information in the classification sheet such as their name, age, place of birth, favourite colour, etc.

When working on a literature review, you may want to collect all the articles written by an author together in one place, as a case.

In a review, we use cases to collect articles by the same author together and conduct analyses across all these articles at once. 

You can also compare cases to identify differences in for example the context two authors discuss a theme you have coded in the texts.

 

Create your cases

  1. View your files in the "List View".
  2. In this example, there I have an author called Salkevicius who has written two articles and I want to collect all these articles as a case.
  3. In the navigation view, scroll down to "Cases", and click on it to activate the drop-down menu.
  4. In the white space (list view) two-finger click and choose "New Top Level Case". A Cae Poperties dialog box pops up.
  5. Give your new case the name "Salkevicius", Click "Done".

    The next step is to gather all the materials this author has written in their "Case". So return to the list of files.

  6. Highlight all the articles you want to add to the case, two-finger click and choose "code files" > "to existing codes or cases" > Choose the case you want to add the files to.
  7. Click "Select" - you have now added the papers written by the author to the case.

You manage cases just as you would your codes. By two-finger clicking on your case, you can merge them and rename them. You can even code the content of your project to multiple cases if you need to.

When you have set up your cases you can begin to compare how authors address themes across multiple coded texts. In the Ribbon View click on "Explore", "Diagrams" and "Compare cases" to get started.

 

Case Classifications

You can also create a case classification sheet describing attributes of your cases. Perhaps for your study it is relevant to describe the nationality, seniority and gender of your authors. The attributes you describe depend on the type of analyses you intend to do.

This is how you create a Case Classification Sheet:

  1. In the Navigation menu, scroll down to Cases and click on the arrow if necessary to view Case Classifications feature.
  2. Hightlight "Case Classification" feature and in the white space in the list view, two finger click and choose  "New Classification".
  3. In the Case classification Properties box that pops up, give your classificaion sheet a name and description. In this example, I am making a classification sheet to describe the demographics of the authors in my review.
  4. Click "Done". You are now ready to add some attributes to your classification sheet.
  5. Two finger click on the name of your classification sheet to open it up. There are two tabs - an attribute tab and a classification sheet tab.
  6. Click on the "attribute" tab to see your attributes. Two finger click on "Add some attributes, for example age, gender, country of birth..."
    1. Give your attribute the Name "Gender" and description of what the attribute describes.
    2. Use the "+" to add values one at a time, that is gender categories relevant for your study (Female, Male, Non-binary, etc).
    3. Click OK when you are done.

Repeat for all the attributes on your sheet. Delete unwanted attributes by right click > delete. 
Add new attributes, by right-click on the name of your classification sheet and choose "New Attribute"

 

Describe your cases using the classification sheet

Return to your cases.
Right click on a case and choose "Get Info" and click on the name of the classification sheet you want to add the case to.
Now when you open your classification sheet again, in the "classification" tab you can start adding the demographic information to your cases.


Read more about working with Cases on the NVivo help pages: https://help-nv.qsrinternational.com/14/mac/Content/cases/cases.htm?Highlight=cases