The authors examine ‘ethnograph’ and ‘NUDIST’ under criteria highlighting these
tensions (p178):
analytic purposes: discovering ideas embedded in data vs. exploring
theoretical ideas outside the data;
analytic outcomes: variables vs. constructed interpretation;
epistemological / methodological: how the prestructure defines this and
how explicit this is, participant vs. concept focused.
NUDIST is a popular choice for theme based qualitative analysis. The structure allows a
tree diagram type concept map of codes/themes to be made prior to and during analysis.
However, the authors conclude that Word for Windows is a perfectly adequate tool. They
highlight the basic editing functions (except the bookmark strangely). They point out that
‘cross-case’ analysis is not so easy, as reflected in phase 3 in this study where pieces of
text had to be moved manually from ‘participant’ files to ‘theme’ files.