Cases are nodes which represent the entities within your research (i.e. people, schools, institutions). Your cases should gather together all of the content in your sources related to specific entities (i.e. individual research participants, schools, businesses). For instance, a case for the participant Bernadette should contain references to the transcript of her interview, any contributions she made in the transcript of a focus group, as well as any comments that other participants made about her.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
Cases represent each of the interview and focus group participants and contain references to the content of the sources related to each individual.
For interview participants, each case (e.g. Mary) contains a single reference to their interview transcript. The cases for the focus group participants (e.g. Annette), on the other hand, contain a number of references. These references are to each of the comments that participant made in that focus group.
Cases can have 'attributes' to record those characteristics of the entities which may prove relevant when analyzing the categories and concepts emerging from your data. If you are interviewing, you may have information about many attributes of a respondent (i.e. age, gender, education level) that will be highly relevant.
Each attribute in your project can have many values. For example, the attribute Age Range may have the values of 20-29, 30-39, 40-40 etc. These represent the range of values for that particular characteristic within your project. To store information about your cases, you assign the relevant value for each attribute to each case.
In the Volunteering Sample Project
The attributes are all those characteristics of the participants which may influence their opinions and views about volunteering. These include their Age Group, whether they have Current paid work, and whether they have Ever done volunteer work.
Cases and attributes are ideal for asking comparative questions about the nodes representing other concepts and categories in your project. They enable you to compare and contrast the contents of your cases based on the attribute values assigned to them (i.e. Do interviewees under the age of 30 have different perceptions of volunteering to those over 50?). Such comparisons can lead you to new understandings of your data and the categories and concepts emerging from it.
When working with coding stripes in a source or a node, you can choose to display the stripe for a selected attribute. For example, you could display a stripe for female and see all content coded at cases that are female.