It is recommended that you back up your project before importing another.
At some point in your project you may need to merge your NVivo project with another. Your project may call for a number of team members working with different sources of data or perhaps with different approaches to analyzing the same sources.
It is very important to be clear about your reasons for merging projects. These may be central to your approach to your research and data, such as:
To bring together multiple bodies of data under the same analysis umbrella (i.e. data collected by different members of a team)
To facilitate different analyses of the same data (i.e. from different members of a team with different analytical approaches)
To compare the data and outcomes from an earlier project with another (i.e. for a longitudinal project)
On the other hand, you may wish to share the framework of your project (i.e. node hierarchies, sets, attributes and values), rather than its content. For instance, you may want to:
Share patterns of analysis between researchers
Commence a similar or new related project quickly
Create a project structure (or template) for use by all team members
As you plan your research, consider the points at which projects should be merged. This could be after the completion of first round interviews or once topic coding has reached a mature stage. This will ensure that you are able to keep a big picture view of all data sources and analysis processes in your project, even though they are effectively separate.
As you merge your projects, ensure your reasons for merging are reflected in the options you choose. For example,
If your aim is to bring together different data from team members in different areas who interviewed different participants in different geographical areas, it is possible that some of these participants have the same name.
As you would like to merge both projects' content, it is important to import all items, including their content. Also, as it is likely that there will be some duplication in your cases, it is important to choose not to merge duplicate items but to create them as new items.
If a team member wants to share their project's tree node hierarchies (or other nodes) so that you can use it in your analysis, it is unlikely that you want to merge the content of their project with your own.
Therefore, it is important to import only the tree nodes, excluding their content, into your project.
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It is recommended that you back up your project before importing another. |
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