Although this was a bit soul-destroying at the time, it was nonetheless quite a useful exercise because I was reading literature in light of my data, and reviewing the literature at the same time as analysing my data meant that I made so many more connections between them than if they had been done as entirely the linear, separate processes that PhD timetables (and by extension the advice of the NVivo trainers) often seem to assume. Of course real research life is not like that, and hindsight is a wonderful thing! My diary keeping prior to fieldwork was sporadic at best and didn’t really amount to anything much, and the literature review I undertook prior to fieldwork ended up being at least partly irrelevant once I had collected a bit of data and realised that entirely new themes were emerging which I hadn’t even considered hence I had to completely redo it once I got back. I could certainly see the logic of that, and with retrospect it may well have been that if I had started off with my literature review and research diary I could have perhaps ordered them within NVivo and then used it a bit more consistently throughout the PhD.
Initially I had the training (I think in NVivo version 2) quite early on in the PhD – prior to data collection – and the theory was that if we got used to it before collecting data then adding data as we went along would be a piece of cake and we would be thoroughly versed in the software so be able to use it to its full potential. When I did my PhD I had the chance to have training in NVivo, which is a qualitative data analysis software package provided by QSR International.