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session?);
Learnings
(Did I learn anything from the session today?); and
Applications
(Can I apply anything of what I learned or discovered today to my life and work?).
During the program each student produced several documents, presenting semi-
structured data. This instrument was fundamental because it encouraged students to
develop self-awareness and build their own learnings, and supported the trainers in
monitoring the program. It also subsequently enabled to assess the contents and
processes in the development of the educational process (i.e., the program). This
paper focuses on this last objective, explaining the support of NVivo. The second
instrument was scenarios involving the expression of one of four emotions (fear,
sadness, despair and anger) to be exhibit by the student playing careseeker.
1.3
Qualitative Analysis Software and NVivo
Qualitative research focuses on phenomena in all of their complexity, and emphasizes
understanding behavior from the perspective of those embedded in the phenomena
[6]. Often, the use of this methodology implies dealing with large amounts of
unstructured data, something that poses several technical and conceptual challenges
for researchers. Qualitative Data Analysis software emerged in response to some of
these difficulties encountered by researchers and proposes itself to support research
projects from their early stages, namely helping in the phase of defining the research
question. Researchers today can access several QDA packages, one of them being
NVivo. We adopted this software as a research instrument when doing qualitative
research supported by the fact that it helps thinking about research itself and about
data. It helps to find and manage ideas, exploring relationships in the data and finding
emergent concepts. We believe it to be an important resource when the researcher,
doing qualitative research, wants to understand processes and experiences [7].
2
How NVivo Supported Evaluating the Program
As already stated, we were looking to evaluate a developmental program, based on
participants' experiences. In this section we present the ways NVivo supported our
research since gathering the data, enabling different approaches without transforming
the original data.
Handling a Large Volume of Information.
Our research project includes several
sources of information per participant, which were gathered at different moments of
the program. In a first exploratory approach we considered the information from six
participants, having eight sources of information per case (i.e., one SISDAT per
moment for each participant). As we redefined our research questions the research
[and NVivo's] project
1
became more complex and the number of participants
increased to a point where we now have eight sources of information (i.e., eight
SISDATs) per case regarding 30 participants at year one of analysis and six sources
1
An NVivo's file is called
project
.
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