I wrote a while back that I often use a piece of software for the Mac called Tinderbox to churn through messy, unstructured focus group data and see the meaning and inherent structure in a soup of qualitative data. I was fortunate to be asked to present my method at a Tinderbox Weekend last November by Tinderbox auteur Mark Bernstein. It’s a complicated process at the start, but once it’s set up correctly you can zip through qualitative research data pretty quickly and develop structure in the process. Tinderbox is great for this because, unlike a traditional outliner, you don’t have to impose that structure at the beginning of the process, and you don’t have to find a single “box” to put information in. Qualitative data is messy, because people are messy–they don’t all fit into single boxes either.
Mark (and Eastgate’s Stacy Mason) have been noodging me to make a screencast of this process, and I’ve finally gotten around to doing just that. The video is a bit over 30 minutes long and you might want to make this full-screen, as some of the text might be a bit small. This may be interesting to qualitative researchers, Tinderbox fans or insomniacs. Enjoy!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Tom,
Thank you for the video. It’s really interesting. I have been considering using Tinderbox for my research project, it the video illustrates what the software is capable of.
One thing that I’m wondering though, is whether Tinderbox allows the user to go back to the raw (or ‘exploded’) transcripts from a categorised note. Without this function, I’m worried about running a risk of fragmenting and de-contexualising data.
For example, you might have a note in the final sort that is categrised using one of the attributes. But what is being said in the note may only be understood properly in a broader context. Without the ability to then go back to the whole transcripts and cross-referencing the note with other comments in the transcript, you would run the risk of using the comment out of the context. (like journos often do… a terrible practice!)
Thanks so much for this, Tom. I, too, am using Tiderbox in concert with Devonthink Pro and with NVIVO. Your video was extremely helpful. In regard to the above points, I was thinking of an=dding an attribute which keeps the name of the original file, e.g., “Interview with Tom 3,7,10,” with the data “atom.”
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for your suggestion about attaching the name of the original file to a note as an attribute. That sounds like a great idea!
You have mentioned that you use Tinderbox with Devonthink Pro and NVivo. Do you think Tinderbox and the others compliment each other? Do you think Tinderbox can be used in place of Devonthink and/or NVivo?
Intuitively I think that TB might do all I want, but there’s an ease of use with devonthink that allows some original input and recordkeeping that is helpful. I was using Nvivo to do much of what Tom recommends in his video though. When one uses a conceptual framework for qualitative data, Tom’s ideas show the promise of bring comprehensive. I wish I had been at the Workshop where he had presented this.
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for your response. It looks like Tinderbox is what I need. I will further look into it.
Yes, that workshop would’ve been amazing.
Tom, MANY thanks for taking the time to put that screencast together. It’s exactly the mix of research substance and technical tool tricks that I needed to get Tinderbox really working for me. And your comments on the need to switch sides of the brain during this kind of research were wonderful.