1. Understanding Queries

What Are Queries?

Queries in NVivo are a way of asking questions of your data and your research project. They help you to explore your project and to gain valuable insights from it. This section will help you understand how to create, edit, and manage queries.

Essentially, whenever we run a query in NVivo we're asking very similar questions. What am I looking for and where am I looking for it?

Video: Running and Understanding Queries in NVivo

There are a lot of things that you can do with queries in NVivo, this video by the ever-helpful Hull University Library touches on the basics of running and creating coding queries in NVivo.

NVivo 12: Coding query by Hull University Library (2019)

Word Clouds

Whilst word clouds are a tired trope in many a conference presentation, they are a great way of understanding how queries can help you to create visualisations in NVivo. Word clouds can also help you to make sense of your data and get a quick snapshot of how it's all looking.

You can use queries to accomplish quite a lot, this video explores how you can run a query to find word frequency in your project, and to conduct a general text search and how to create a word cloud.

NVivo 12 tutorial: Word frequency and text search by Dr. Billy Wong (2018)

Task: Running Queries and Creating Word Clouds

1. Using the videos provided above, run a word frequency query.

   1. Bonus task: Try to modify your queries by altering the files that can be accessed, or by changing the query parameters.

2. Create a word cloud from the word frequency query

   1. Bonus task: Try to remove words from the word cloud to clean up the visualisation