Hi everyone,
This post is about how to attach attributes to each participant of a focus group interview using MaxQDA.
Suppose you have conducted a number of focus groups. Each of them corresponds to a text document that has been nicely imported into your MaxQDA 2018 project through Import / Focus Groups Transcripts (so that now all your participants have been automatically identified).
Now, for each document, you want to relate participants names with other characteristics (such as age, gender etc.). The idea is, after coding, to explore some relationships between themes, topics or codes and the participants according to their characteristics. You may have all these individual-level characteristics organised in a spreadsheet (e.g. in Excel table), as this may have been collected through a questionnaire. In this Excel table each column shows exactly the same information as in the MaxQDA list of participants (in the column "Participant").
Question: Does MaxQDA allow to relate these sociodemographics to each focus group participant through a link between the list of participants and the Excel table. Or all these data necessarily have to be entered manually (i.e. open the participants list in MaxQDA and edit each cell manually)?
I am aware of the hints provided in the video tutorial "MAXQDA 12: Document Variables" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSpdv1VJEMQ) and on the webpage https://www.maxqda.com/max12-tutorial/j-case-variables-and-activation-by-variable/j-4-importing-and-exporting-variables. However, I am afraid this is only helpful to relate attributes to the document (which is fine in the case of individual interviews, where the document relates 1:1 to a single interviewee). In the case of focus groups, one document relates to the conversation with N participants, so a relationship 1:N prevails).
Many thanks in advance!
Version: MAXQDA 2018
System: Windows 10