MaxQDA Tutorial: Importing and Analyzing Focus Group Transcripts (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to another MaxQDA video tutorial. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to import and work with focus group transcripts. I am assuming here that you have already created a focus group transcript, either by using an external program or by using the MaxQDA transcription tool. You can find all information about using this tool in a separate video tutorial or in our online tutorial on the MaxQDA website. When creating a focus group transcript you only have to keep two things in mind. First, start a new paragraph for every contribution. Secondly, start every paragraph with the participant's name followed by a colon. If you keep these two things in mind, your transcript will look like this. To import it into MaxQDA, simply right-click on the folder Documents in the Document System window and choose Import Focus Group Transcript. Select your transcript from your device and open it. As you can see, MaxQDA does not only import the file but automatically creates a list of all the persons that participated in your focus group interview. You can see that list in the document system as well as the code system window. To show you the advantages of this feature, I'll skip ahead and show you the same project as it may look after a first round of coding. As you may recall from the Getting Started video tutorial, we learned that we can use activated documents and codes to have MaxQDA display lists of certain codings. Now focus group transcripts have one big advantage. The participants can be activated as codes as well as subsets of documents. I'll give you an example. I want to have a look at all contributions made to the discussion by one specific participant. To do so, I first activate the whole focus group in the document system and then activate said participant in the code system. Another example. What if I want to look at all statements of one participant on one certain topic? I simply activate the participant in the document system and select the code in question in the code system. The retrieved segments window now displays all relevant results. In addition to this, you can open a very useful overview for your focus group transcripts. Just right-click the focus group transcript and choose Overview of Focus Group Participants and you receive a list of information including, for example, the amount of all contributions made by different persons and their extent. Of course, there are several other MaxQDA features that can be used in combination with your focus group transcripts. For example, the Code Matrix Browser, the Quote Matrix, Crosstabs and the Lexical Search. Of course, you can also work with variables when analyzing focus groups. You can find detailed information as well as ways to use these features in the MaxQDA Reference Manual, which you can download from the MaxQDA website or find it in MaxQDA under Help – MaxQDA Reference Manual.