If you are unsure as to which type of node to create, ask these questions of what you aim to represent in your project:
Does it represent an entity within your research, such as a person or institution?
Consider creating a case node
Does it represent a topic, theme or category within your sources? If so, does it relate to other topics, themes or categories within your project?
If it does, consider creating a tree node. If not, consider creating a free node.
Does it represent a connection between items in your project?
Consider creating a relationship between these items
Names of nodes, as of any project item, are best kept short and very pertinent. This will help you find the relevant node quickly for coding and will help to ensure that you use it consistently.
A description is highly useful for recording current thinking on a concept, or instructions about how the node is being used.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
Each of the parent tree nodes (e.g. Assumptions, Contexts) contains a description about what they are intended to represent and the nature of the data to be coded at them.
Nicknames can be provided to provide rapid access to frequently used nodes while coding.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
It is important to find a balance between the nodes in your project being too sparse to do justice to the data and too many as to be unwieldy and onerous to use consistently. These factors may influence the number of nodes in your project:
The nature of your research:
A short term project that aims for a thematic summary of the material, might have relatively few nodes compared with a long term project whose goals include detailed interpretation, pursuit of multiple meanings, or pattern seeking and validation across samples or sites.
The nature of the particular research methodology for your project (i.e. a discourse analysis project may use only annotations and memos to store interpretations of sources, rather than nodes.)
The stage of your project:
The number of nodes will often change throughout the course of your project. You may start with very few categories and themes in your initial topic coding, then create a number of new categories and themes as you continue with your analysis and then refine them down in the later stages.
