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UCDHSC Center for Nursing Research

How to Use Atlas-Ti 5.0 9/21/06, page 1

How to Use Atlas-TI, version 5.0

To analyze qualitative data, you will probably start with a tape or an electronic file of an

interview or focus group. Transcription usually takes 4-6 hours per one hour of recording

(you can get it down to 3-4 hours if you type fast).

Start by creating a text file, using MS Word or another application, to enter your data.

• It is recommended that you store each interview, focus group, or other data item

as a separate file. This will be useful later if you want to look for differences

between interviewees or groups.

• The unit of analysis depends on the type of study you are doing. For example, if

you are using focus groups, the group is probably the unit of analysis, rather than

individual participants. Therefore, each group (rather than each person) should

have a separate file.

• It is recommended that you name the file with a unique identifier: for example,

“fg101505” for a focus group conducted on 10/15/05.

• The usual standard for interviews or focus groups is that you audiotape the

interview, and then transcribe verbatim into your data file. You can probably

transcribe a 1-hour interview in 4-6 hours.

• It helps to label each speaker before everything they say (e.g., “I:” for

interviewer).

• There is no point in using italics or other special formatting, because these will be

lost when you bring the file into Atlas-TI for analysis. Just type each statement on

one line, and then put one hard return between statements.

It’s very important that you make all text edits in Word, before you export to Atlas –

in other words, make sure the file is final before you begin your analysis. You can’t make

corrections within Atlas, and if you need to go back to Word you will lose all of the

coding work that you have done up to that point.



Next, save your file as plain text (“.txt”). To do this, use the “Save As” command in the

“File” menu of word, and select “Plain Text” from the drop-down menu at the bottom of

the screen that’s labeled “Save as type.” Click the “Save” button to go on.



This dialog box will appear:

Check the box for “insert line breaks” (otherwise, all of your data will appear on one line

in Atlas-TI, making it very hard to read!).

Then click “OK” to finish saving the file.



Now you are finally ready to open the Atlas-TI application itself. This should be on

your desktop or in the Start Menu at the bottom of your screen, under “Programs.”

When you open the application, you will see several windows open. A “tip of the day”

window will pop up automatically – just close it to go on.

The main window is in the back. To start a new Atlas-TI file, select “Create a new

Hermeneutic Unit” in the front dialog box. The “Hermeneutic Unit” is the basic file type

for Atlas-TI. A hermeneutic unit is a sort of “container” that you will put your text files

into.

Now you will see just the blank workspace, the back window.

Your new hermeneutic unit (which is the Atlas-TI “container” file) will initially just be

called “New Hermeneutic Unit.” The name appears at the top of the program window.

You can re-name the hermeneutic unit by using the “save as” command in the File menu,

or you can name the hermeneutic unit the first time you save it once you have imported

some documents. Call it by the name of your study: e.g., “medication compliance study,”

or anything you like.



Your next step is to “assign documents” to fill your container. This command is found in

the “Documents” menu, using the “Assign” menu item. Use the browser to locate your

text documents containing the qualitative data you wish to examine. Select the item in the

browser, and then click the “Open” button.

If you cannot find your primary documents, you may not have saved them in the correct

format. Go back to Word and try re-saving as a Plain Text (.txt) file before loading these

documents into Atlas-TI.



You will not immediately see your document in Atlas-TI, but it appears in the

“documents” drop-down menu (the menus are not labeled, but the left-hand menu is your

list of primary documents).

You can add multiple documents at this step. Save each of your primary documents

(separate interviews or focus groups) as text, and attach them to your Atlas-TI file using

the same “assign” command. You will see the list of all primary documents in this menu.

Select the document from the list and double-click its name to see the text:

Then use the X-box to close the “primary doc manager” window that’s sitting on top, and

you will see the document itself, ready for coding.



This is the Primary Document Viewer screen. Your text should appear formatted the

way it was in Word. If it all appears on one long line, you may not have selected the

“with line breaks” command when you exported to a text file. Tabs, special characters,

and anything other than hard line breaks will have been lost in saving the document as a

text file, so don’t expect to see those here.

If you would like to see line numbers next to your text (some people find that it helps

them keep track of their place in the document), you can click the “99” button on the

left-hand side of the screen.

Now you are ready to code your qualitative results. Start by selecting a block of text that

seems to represent a concept. You may have different levels of codes – one may be fairly

basic (a “content code”), and another may be at a general “theme” that is at a higher level

of abstraction. In this case, I have selected some text that describes an interaction with

health professionals.

Go to the “Codes” menu, select the “Coding” sub-menu, and select “Open Coding.” A

dialog box will appear that asks you to name the code. I’m going to call this one “health

professionals” – but you can make up any codes that make sense based on your approach,

theoretical perspective, and data.

In this version of Atlas-Ti, you can enter more than one code at a time to the same block

of text – just use the “|” character (above the Enter key) to separate the codes.



Three new items have now appeared in my hermeneutic unit:

The actual code assigned to this text has now appeared on the right-hand side of the

screen.

All text that has been selected and assigned a code (termed “quotations” in Atlas-TI)

appears in the second drop-down menu.

The list of all available codes (there’s one of them now) has appeared in the third drop-

down menu.

Now you can go through and assign codes to your text data. Don’t feel bad about

skipping sections of text that don’t seem to have relevance for your coding; qualitative

analysis is about selecting and abstracting important information.

Some suggestions for creating codes:

• Stay close to the data in making up your codes. Try to use the participant’s words

• Use codes at different levels of abstraction.

• Your codes appear alphabetically. To group them, you can use names like

“barrier-side effects,” “barrier-logistics,” “barrier-worries,” etc.

• Use coding memos (see next page) to keep track of what you mean by a code

when you first use it, so that the meaning doesn’t drift as you do more coding.



A convenient way to assign codes is by using the Codes Window in Atlas-TI. Click on

the box next to the codes drop-down menu to see the codes window:

The Codes window allows you to create new codes using the left-hand button (looks like

an eraser). You can name new codes as you create them, whenever you come to an item

in the text that needs a new code. You can create as many different codes as you need,

and you can link each code to as many different quotations as you like.

The lower area of this screen is a place to enter a code memo that allows you to describe

to yourself what that code means. (If the box is grayed-out, you need to start by clicking

on the code in the list that you want to write a memo about). Memoing your codes is a

good way to document what you mean by each term, so that you don’t use a different

meaning of the same term later.

You can assign codes to text using two steps:

1. Use your cursor to highlight the text in the main window.

2. Assign the code to the text by dragging that code onto the text, from the list in the

codes window.

Once you have done this, your code will display in the right-hand panel showing the link

to that particular quotation in the text.



Don’t drag the text to the codes window – it’s always a process of dragging the code to

the text, not vice-versa. Dragging the text into the codes window creates a new code

using exactly that text, which is probably not what you want to do.

As you link each code to more quotations, you will notice that the numbers to the right of

the code name will also change. The first number after the code name is a running count

of how many times the code has been used in this document.

If you make a mistake in your coding, here’s how to fix it:

Select the erroneous code from the right-hand panel. Right-click on the code that you

want to remove, and a pop-up menu will appear. Select “Unlink” from the menu to

remove the connection between the code and the quotation.

Don’t select “delete code” from the Codes menu, even though this might seem logical. If

you select “delete code,” Atlas-TI will delete every instance of that code and you will

lose that piece of your work so far.



Handy feature: If you double-click on a code in the Codes window, Atlas-TI will show

you all of the quotations that you’ve assigned to that code so far. This can be helpful in

checking your coding, to make sure that the meaning of a code is consistent throughout

your use of that term.

If you right-click a code in the list on the right-hand side of the screen, you can select

“display info” from the drop-down menu:

This feature is useful if you have multiple coders working with the same hermeneutic

unit, and you want to find out who entered a certain code. In this case, the code was



entered by “GUEST.” You may also see codes entered by “SUPER,” which is short for

supervisor (the person who set up the hermeneutic unit and gave others access to it).

Using multiple coders requires additional steps, including developing consensus

definitions of codes, establishing a shared codebook, training raters to achieve reliable

results (possibly including coding exercises), measuring percent agreement, etc.

Editing Your Coding: There is unfortunately no “undo” feature in Atlas-ti. But if you

make a mistake, you can also amend a code. First, left-click on the code that you want to

change (on the right-hand panel of the document viewer). Second, highlight the block of

text that you actually want that code to refer to, in the main document section of the

window. Finally, click on the button that looks like a check mark in the left-had button

bar. This will take the same code and re-apply it to the new block of text.



Once you have finished coding, you can use the Query Tool for your analysis (look in

the “tools” menu, or use the icon at the top of the screen that looks like binoculars). This

tool allows you to select single codes, or combinations of codes, and find all quotations

that match those codes. You can use the tools on the left-hand side of this query tool to

select quotations where one text item is enclosed by another, where one type of code

overlaps another, or where one type of code follows or precedes another. In this example,

I have looked for “patient thinks that medication was not needed” followed by “patient

discontinued medication.”

1. Select the codes here.

2. Use these buttons to select the combination or other operation you want to perform.

3. View the results here.

4. You can also use the “printer” icon to get text output with the full quotations (rather

than just the short versions shown here). You can save these outputs for later reference:



You can create “super-codes” using the Query Tool, to refer to these combinations of

codes that you identified.

You can also assign single codes into higher-level “families” using an option in the

Codes menu:

This opens a sub-window where you can select several codes, and create a new code

family that describes the group of codes:

Name the family using this

button, and then select from the

“non-members” (right-hand) list

to assign new members to the

family (by moving them to the

left-hand list using the arrow

buttons).

You can use the “memo” space

at the bottom of this window to

create a note to yourself

describing your family.



You can then run analyses by family, rather than by individual codes. Similarly, you can

create document families for primary documents (“Documents” menu: “edit families”).

Document families allow you identify all documents that share a particular characteristic

and link them together so that you can compare families of primary documents to other

families. For example, families of documents can be identified by geographic area

(“rural” and “urban”) and comparisons of codes assigned based on primary documents

examined to generate hypotheses about differences between documents.

Memos can be created to track your thoughts, reactions, or ideas as you go through the

process of coding your data. Any space that is yellow is a memo, since the creators of the

software identified a yellow space with a post-it note. Memos can be attached to a code

(as we saw in the Codes window), or to a code family (using the yellow space in the

“families” window), but they can also be attached to an individual quotation. To do this,

select the text you want to memo, and use the “memo” button on the left-hand side of the

screen to open a memo editor, and to create a “free memo” associated with that text.

Memos are notes to yourself, which you can use to track information that is less-

structured than codes or that you want to keep track of for later reference. (Memos about

quotations show up in the fourth drop-down box at the top of the screen, so that you can

see the list of all memos you have created, and link back to the text that they refer to).



Keeping a record of thoughts that occur to the coder during the coding process can be

considered part of the “audit trail,” to use a term from Lincoln and Guba. The audit trail

is created during the process of analysis, but can be viewed later by others to “audit” the

process of analysis. Some qualitative researchers even suggest recreating the process of

analysis by asking a researcher uninvolved in the process to audit the coded data and see

if, by reviewing the codes, code families, quotations, and memos, he or she could have

come to similar conclusions about the data.

Finally, you may want to generate quantitative summaries or “counts” of your codes (this

may be most applicable to a content analysis qualitative approach). To generate these

quantitative metrics, use the “Output” command in the “Codes” menu:

The two most useful analyses are probably the following:

• The codes-primary documents table shows a count of how many times each code

was used in each primary document (interview, focus group, etc.), and how many

times each code was used overall. This table may be helpful if you want to report

numbers, percentages, etc. for each theme or concept that you identified. (You can

even generate a report in a format that’s suitable for export to Microsoft Excel).

• The all codes with quotations report gives you a list of all codes, with every

quotation that links to each of the codes. This level of detail may be helpful to

print out and refer to as you write up your results.

Other choices in this menu are similar to the results that you can obtain using the query

function discussed above, to find lists of quotations associated with each individual code.