How does the operation of PHARMAC's 'Community Exceptional ...

I was assisted by a data analysis software system produced by QSR
International Ltd named NVivo 8 to capture, organise, code and interrogate the
five data sets. This programme helped me to organise and manage thousands
of pieces of information from the component sources. These were research
materials such as transcripts from interviews, hand written journal entries,
emails, notes made at meetings, media reports, official documents, unofficial
documents and court proceedings.
The NVivo 8 programme refers to a technical term “nodes” as synonymous with
the term “codes” (Lavery, 2009a). Before beginning to manage material from
the five data sources into NVivo 8 nodes, I selected what I thought were
suitable nodes and wrote a short description of each node based on my pre-
reading. This clarified for me where the data ought to be placed and where
material from the research was best placed. I made decisions about which
nodes to code the text into, based on my understanding of the material and the
relational words or references to topics in the text. It is common for text to
relate to more than one node and therefore judgment is required to allocate the
pieces of text to the most appropriate node or to several nodes.
I was fortunate to be the only participant on a two-day “Introduction to NVivo 8
Extending Analyses” course run by the firm Academic Consulting Ltd. I was
able to begin coding my data with an NVivo expert at my side checking my
coding technique into the selected nodes. After the first day, the data which had
been entered into the nodes were checked for credibility and categorisation and
discussed. This was a helpful exercise and set up clear patterns of coding using
the software. There were two types of nodes used in the coding: free nodes and
tree nodes. Free nodes were stand-alone nodes for which there was a clear
and logical connection between the data and the node. These nodes did not
easily fit into a hierarchy of ideas that connect or were dependant on other
ideas. Free nodes do not have a structure and are organised in an alphabetical
list (Lavery, 2009b).
As opposed to free nodes, tree nodes were organised in a hierarchical structure
moving from a general category at the top of the node, named a parent node, to
a more specific category named child nodes or even to more specific categories
yet called grandchild nodes (Lavery, 2009b).
100