NVivo

NVivo is qualitative data analysis software for organising and coding interviews, focus groups, field notes, documents, survey open-ends and multimedia. It does not analyse data for you — the interpretation remains the researcher's — but it makes a large qualitative dataset systematically manageable.

The core structure is the node: a container for everything coded to a particular theme. Nodes can be arranged hierarchically into parent and child themes, and cases hold attributes such as demographics, which allows comparison of how themes differ across participant groups through matrix coding queries.

Its practical advantage in a thesis is the audit trail. Coding is recorded, revisable and retrievable, memos capture analytical reasoning as it develops, and queries such as word frequency, text search and coding comparison (with Cohen's kappa for inter-rater reliability) provide evidence of systematic analysis that examiners can inspect.