Examining health, medicine and society in Tucuman, Argentina, using NVivo

Overview

Assistant Professor Ruben Calduch is the Health, Medicine and Society Director of the Faculty of Medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina. Ruben is using QSR International’s NVivo software to explore the links between social issues and health problems in South America.

Qualitative research has always had a role to play in examining the links between lifestyle and disease in an attempt to find new ways to improve society’s general health. Increasingly, qualitative data analysis software has also become an integral part of these important studies.

Assistant Professor Ruben Calduch is the Health, Medicine and Society Director of the Faculty of Medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina. Ruben is using QSR International’s NVivo software to explore the links between social issues and health problems in South America. Here, he shares details of his research, his experience using NVivo 7, and his plans for the Spanish language version of NVivo 8.

Enhanced credibility

Ruben heads up a team of researchers instrumental in examining the impact of social settings and human bonds on general health conditions in Argentina. Research in this area is particularly complex given its focus on understanding how things like social settings, attitudes, economic issues and culture can impact on the health-sickness process. Part of the challenge is the need to evaluate substantial information across a wide variety of mediums, including written data, audio files and unedited vision of subjects in a natural or group environment.

After more than a decade in qualitative research in the health field, Assistant Professor Ruben Calduch first came across NVivo software in 2001. Ruben said NVivo gave shape to and organized his raw data, which helped him and his fellow researchers to evaluate their information and draw conclusions. “I had a sense of joy when one could see what was happening while working with the information. The sensation was that we could show what we did in our (qualitative) field, in the same way statisticians do in theirs,” he said.

The ability to be able to share their results with researchers in other fields by using the software’s functionality added greater credibility to the findings and assisted when teaching students. “It made qualitative research credible for people coming from traditional experimental or statistical research,” said Ruben.

Greater collaboration

One feature of NVivo is that it allows a team of users to enter data individually and merge separate projects while still identifying the work of individuals. For Ruben’s team research project, this functionality was essential as each of the team members gathered their own data with texts from interviews, workshops, videos and audio files. Each team member then imported the raw data and did their own coding.

“Afterwards, we met and compared the coding, discussed it and built a common tree together. It was useful to present it in a graphical way through presentations, either in undergraduate classes or at conferences and lectures,” Ruben said.

The capability of NVivo to manage very rich data was of particular importance for the research team who were able to make sense of a wide variety of complex information. The way NVivo presents the data is also of benefit in the academic setting.

“I teach at medical school, and always have to express abstract or complex terms or ideas from the mental health field for undergraduate students and to doctors. They love to ‘see and hear’ what happens with people and it is hard for them to understand psychosocial issues. And of course this is where NVivo helps,” Ruben said.

“The coding processes gave shape to raw data, the modelling shows ideas working, and the matrix shows conclusions in the density of the data.”