NVivo 2.0 and ATLAS.ti 5.0: A Comparative Review of Two Popular Qualitative Data-Analysis Programs

ATLAS.ti 5.0 and NVivo 2.0 are among the best available and potentially most useful qualitative data analysis (QDA) tools. Both products enable the researcher to associate codes or labels with chunks of text, sounds, pictures, or video; to search these codes for patterns; and to construct classifications of codes that reflect testable models of the conceptual structure of the underlying data. Both are tremendously flexible programs that can be readily applied in a wide range of applications. Both also are Microsoft Windows-based products; neither program is available for the Mac OS. This review examines the latest versions of these products. My remarks are aimed at prospective new users who need to decide which product may be best suited for the research tasks they have in mind. To a certain extent, this examination also revisits my comparative review (Lewis 1998) of ATLAS.ti 4.0 and NUD•IST 4.0, the latter of which can be viewed as the forerunner of NVivo. One thing I did not like about NUD•IST 4.0 and ATLAS.ti 4.0 (Lewis 1998) was that they only worked directly with a limited range of data file types. Both programs, for example, required the researcher to convert text files to ASCII or ANSI file formats before inputting them, which meant, of course, that the section and other formatting were stripped away from a text file before it was imported, a process that also made it difficult to import such things as tables and footnotes. As if this were not enough, there was the fur-