Journal of Mixed Methods Research

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Media Review: Atlas.ti Software to Assist With the Qualitative Analysis of Data
Graham R. Gibbs
Journal of Mixed Methods Research 2007; 1; 103
DOI: 10.1177/2345678906291490

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 Bergman / Media Reviews 103

References
Brewer, J., & Hunter, A. (1989). Multimethod research: A synthesis of styles. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Campbell, D. T., & Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multi-
method matrix. Psychological Bulletin, 56, 81-105.

Atlas.ti Software to Assist With the Qualitative Analysis of Data. Berlin: Scientific Software
Development. http://www.atlasti.com/
DOI: 10.1177/2345678906291490

Atlas.ti Version 5 is a program for Windows PC that assists with the analysis of qualitative data.
Two or three programs now dominate in this field, and Atlas.ti is one of them. Version 5 was
released in June 2004 and while keeping the major aspects of the interface and functionality of the
previous version, 4.2, it brought in some key revisions in usability and output to what was already
a very powerful program.
The main way in which Atlas.ti assists in qualitative analysis is in its support for coding. In
Atlas.ti, the text being worked on appears on the left of the main window, and in the margin area to
the right of it, colored brackets can be displayed to indicate (by the displayed name) which lines of
text have been coded to which codes. It is easy to see while reading the text what text has already
been coded. Atlas.ti thus has a very visual and convivial way of showing both coding and its context.
Texts can be imported into Atlas.ti in .txt, .rtf, or MS Word .doc formats. Unlike most other pro-
grams, Atlas.ti also supports the coding of digital images, audio, and video, and a very wide range
of different media formats can be used. In the case of images, rectangular areas can be selected and
coded. With audio and video, portions of the time line can be selected and coded. At the moment,
there is no way of selecting an area of a video image for coding.
One of the strongest aspects of Atlas.ti is its search facility. Searching can be done for text and
combined with auto coding, whereby all the finds (and any surrounding text if required) are auto-
matically coded. With careful formatting, this can be used to quickly code answers to open-ended
questions in a survey. The other major form of searching is using codes. This enables, for example,
the retrieval of text that is coded as X and also coded as Y. Such combinations can be Boolean
(and, or, not, xor), semantic (associated with, causes, etc.), or proximity (within, overlap, etc.).
Complex searches can be constructed by combining these terms.
These are some of the significant ways Atlas.ti can be used in qualitative analysis. But how
might it be used in mixed methods research? There are two main approaches that the program can
support. First, research may be mixed at the level of the overall design; thus, a large-scale survey
might identify certain respondents for additional qualitative interviews, or variables might be gen-
erated from the analysis of qualitative interviews and then combined with other quantitative data
about the same cases. Atlas.ti provides some functions that enable the exchange of data with statis-
tical packages like SPSS. Variable data in Atlas.ti is handled by using ‘‘families,’’ which are col-
lections of documents, memos, or codes. A family can be thought of as a single value of a
particular variable as in ‘‘town of origin: London.’’
In the case of a quantitative survey combined with interviews with selected respondents, you
might want to import some categorical data from the survey to enable you to establish some basic
information about the interviews. Variable data from the survey can be saved in the Comma Sepa-
rated Values (CSV) format and then imported into Atlas.ti as document families. Several variables

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104 Journal of Mixed Methods Research

can be dealt with at once and documents assigned to values for each variable. If you take this
approach, then you need to make sure your cases (e.g., respondents) are the same as the documents
in the project. If your documents are, for example, focus groups and your cases are individuals in
these groups, then there is no way you can easily link these cases in Atlas.ti with data from a quanti-
tative data set. It is also possible to link the other way (Atlas.ti project to quantitative data) by export-
ing document family data as a CSV file. However, you have to remember to create family names in
the format variable name::value so that the correct columns in the output CSV file are established.
Unfortunately, using codes rather than documents as the basis for export to a quantitative data
set is nowhere near as easy. It is possible to export the entire project to SPSS, but this treats each
quotation (coded segment) as a separate case, although it does include a variable to indicate for
each code and family whether the quotation is coded or not. It is possible, but not a simple matter,
to use SPSS to filter out only those quotations that are in a certain document or relevant to a certain
case and hence establish a link between codes and documents.
Another form of output that will be useful for some researchers is XML. Those who are familiar
with XML are able to write simple programs to manipulate and use the data from the project.
A second way of mixing methods is to use various quantitative measures that can be created
from the qualitative data to assist with its analysis in an exploratory way. Atlas.ti provides such a
facility in its WordCruncher. This produces word frequency counts for each of the documents in
the project. Again, this means giving some thought to the relationship between cases and docu-
ments. Frequency lists for all documents can be produced at once, and the data can be imported
and further processed in a spreadsheet to get relative frequencies. The results can be used to high-
light idiosyncratic word use or infrequent use of common terms and can be used to help with the
first steps of qualitative analysis.
The program comes with two manuals, a short Quick Tour for Beginners (30 pages) and a well-
written and comprehensive Users Guide and Reference (411 pages), though the latter’s index is
almost useless. There is an active e-mail list of users, and recently the company established a Web-
based discussion board that contains all the past messages from the e-mail list as well as new
topics. This is searchable and is a very useful resource for getting advice about the program.

Graham R. Gibbs
University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

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