By David Lomoywara

USIU-Africa and its students have always been at the forefront when it comes to research work and presentation of papers in international conferences. This year, the institution was privileged to have its alumni, Robert Rukwaro Maina, Immaculate Tallam and David Lomoywara present a paper at the NVivo Virtual Conference held last month. The theme of the Conference was ‘Qualitative research in a changing world’.

The conference came at a time when COVID-19 has turned the globe upside down. The unprecedented turn of events changed the way scholars conduct their research, and most of them have sought to use online platforms and other channels to get data necessary for their studies. In light of this, the overall aim of the conference was to enable participants to meet, learn and network with their peers and other experts from around the world to examine the global impacts on and trends in qualitative research.

In their paper, titled Marrying NVivo with NodeXL: A Qualitative Social Media Research, the three authors focused on the marriage between NodeXL and NVivo software for data mining and analysis to arrive at a hybrid social media data analysis procedure. The authors highlight a guideline on how NodeXL software can be used to mine data on social media sites such as Twitter using hashtags and keywords. After that, the data can then be exported and uploaded on NVivo software for categorization and analysis. They conclude that the two software will play a pivotal role in assisting researchers in continuing with their research work in these unprecedented times.

In their explanation of their rationale behind the paper, the authors noted that there were limited scholarly articles that could guide researchers on procedures that can harness both qualitative and quantitative data from online platforms. The paper therefore fills in this existing gap and will guide researchers while conducting studies using a hybrid mixed method of data on social media platforms.

David and Robert hold a Master’s Degrees in Communication Studies and specialized in Health Communication. They are both experienced in using NVivo software to conduct qualitative research. Immaculate Tallam holds a Master’s Degree in Information Technology, and she is well versed in using NodeXL tool which extracts data online and does sentiment analysis.

For more information on the conference, visit this site.