With the help of summaries, you can condense, summarise and abstract your material in MAXQDA in your own words. This happens mainly in two work phases, which we will look at one after the other in the following. First, you can create your summaries using the summary grid and later analyse them in detail using summary tables and the Summary Explorer. The prerequisite for creating summaries is that we have already coded the text we want to work with. It doesn’t matter whether we have gone through the text step by step and assign codes manually, have created codes automatically for certain search terms or used AI Assist to code our material.
The summary features can be found in the analysis tab. With the summary grid, we can now create our first summaries. Here, the codes from our project are displayed in the rows. The columns stand for the documents. With these buttons, we can also display the summary grid for activated documents and codes only. The blue symbols in the boxes indicate that the corresponding code has been assigned in the document. Up here, we can also switch the display to a numerical view, that shows us precisely how often a specific code appears in a document. And if we click on one of the boxes, the upper right window displays segments from the selected document that have been coded with the corresponding code. For these coded segments, we can use the buttons here to display the origin information, edit comments, and assign memos in the window below. We can now write our first summary. As soon as we have created our first summaries, they will be indicated by green boxes at the nodes. These summaries can be edited and spell-checked at any later point as well.
We can now display our summaries in summary tables. We can create summary tables via the analysis tab or via the Summary Grid toolbar. First, the following window opens. After clicking this button here, we can start off by selecting which codes we want to include. If we do not select anything here, MAXQDA will use all codes for which summaries have been created. Using the tab “Select Variables” you can also select which document variables should be displayed in the table as well. In the table that is then created, the selected documents form rows and the codes form the columns. The summaries written for each document are listed in the code columns. In the first column of the summary table, the document name and the document group are displayed for identification. If we have selected variables for the first column, they appear below the document name. Via drag and drop we can now change the order of the columns. And by clicking on this button, we can limit the display of the columns to the currently activated codes. We can display the segments that belong to one of the cells in the table by right clicking and using the function “Display Summarised coded segments”. In the table, we can also display the coded segments instead of their summaries. For this, we simply right click on the row header and select “Display Coded Segments”. We can also highlight the rows in the documents according to their colour by clicking “Highlight Rows and Document Colour” in the start tab. Using the summary table, we can also create summaries for codes and documents. To do this, we first set the table so that the documents are displayed at the top of the rows. Afterwards we click on the memo symbol and write down our summary here. Code and document summaries can also be opened from the four window interface. Simply open one of the memos for codes or documents and edit the summary.
With the help of the Summary Explorer, you can examine different cases and groups with regard to their summaries. To do this, click on Summary Explorer in the analysis tab and a window appears into which we can drag documents, document sets, or groups and the codes which we would like to examine. We can display the code structure in the original hierarchy and also show the origin information here. This makes it easy to compare the summaries for different documents, document groups, or sets. In addition, we can easily display the summaries for different documents and codes by right clicking on the respective documents or codes, and selecting the overview of summaries from the context menu. This table shows us all the summaries that belong to the respective document or code.
