You may want to find particular items in your project for a number of reasons. You may want to work with those items by adding them to a model or set, or use them as the basis for further analysis. For example, you may want to add the items in a relationship with the "Images of Volunteering" node to a model or a set. On the other hand, you may want to find out how many men have never volunteered.
Different types of find functionality are available in NVivo to address these different types of questions about your data.
If you would like to find items based on their name, consider using Find.
If you would like to find items with particular characteristics, consider using Advanced Find.
If you would like to find items which are associated in a particular way with other items in your project, consider using Grouped Find.
Find allows you to locate items with a particular name or portion of a name. This can be helpful when you have a complex folder or hierarchical structure with a large number of items, or when you would like to find items of different types but the same name.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
A document and a case both have the name Mary. You can locate both of these at once using Find.
Advanced Find helps you locate items with certain characteristics. This may be helpful in asking preliminary questions of your data. You might ask whether you have any cases of employed men who volunteer to determine whether this is an area for further analysis or data gathering. Or you may ask what are all the items which have a see also link to this document?
In the Volunteering Sample Project
In the Volunteering Sample Project, you might use Advanced Find to retrieve all of the relationships involving the context tree node to add to a model. You could use Advanced Find to retrieve all of the female cases in a particular age range.
Grouped Find helps you find items which are associated in a particular way with other items in your project. That is, you might want to see each of the nodes that code each focus group transcript document.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
You may want to review how the different meanings of volunteer work occur in each of the focus groups.
Using Grouped Find, you can list each of the nodes that code each focus group transcript by looking for items coding the Focus Group folder (scope) within the Meanings of Volunteer Work tree node (range).
