A one day course for budding thesis writers is to be held at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat on Friday, February 19th.  The course is limited to ten thesis candidates and will be of interest to those who need to undertake a thesis as a part of their study towards successfully completing a postgraduate qualification.  Students are encouraged to invite their supervisor to share the day with them.    

Shortly before Christmas in 2008, Woodhill Park staff were asked by to mount a one day NVivo 8 course for an Auckland based tertiary provider.  As in order to defray costs for the requesting organisation, it was decided to make places available to other researchers, especially those intending to undertaking computer assisted qualitative research for their thesis or research project.  Hence this one day seminar is now open to others. 

Our experience has shown us that almost without exception, beginning researchers are well advised to get to grips with qualitative analysis before they collect their data.  We've found that if researchers work with NVivo software from the outset, their thesis/report construction process becomes greatly enriched.  We have found that they save time and errors (e.g. with transcriptions) become minimised.  Hence, this one day course (Introducing NVivo 8) is especially relevant to beginning researchers.  But is is also relevant for those more experienced researchers who are not yet familiar with the latest version of this QSR software. 

The course will be held at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat and will be facilitated by Dr. Jens Hansen who is acknowledged internationally as a leading qualitative researcher and teacher of qualitative research computing.  Specific details are as follows:

Course Description

NVivo 8 is the most recent and powerful package to have been released by QSR.  It enables researchers to efficiently handle complex qualitative data so that they can effectively undertake intensive qualitative data analysis.  NVivo 8 creates a flexible environment in which you can create, manage and explore ideas.  It also allows media such as video-clips, images, sound files, and rich text to be included as data.  Video and sound can transcribed and/or annotated within the software as a predicate to completing analysis.  The software includes a built in modeller as well as facilities which enable researchers to create output charts.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the introductory course participants will be able to:

• Create their own NVivo 8 project and navigate around that project;
• Create and import data including memos, rich text documents, video, sound bytes and photos;
• Create ‘nodes’ for storing the coding of data, and code at these nodes;
• Perform searches within an NVivo project; and,
• Report the results of analysis in an appropriate manner.

Course Structure

This course involves ‘hands-on’ learning and includes a mixture of facilitator-led instruction and independent learning.  Participants will need to bring their own lap top which must have a stand alone copy of NVivo 8 installed before arrival. 

Class Size

These workshops will be restricted to eight participants.  However, as a special concession we are happy to have a thesis supervisor attend with their student (providing they share a laptop), or vice versa, we are happy to have a student attend with his/her supervisor (providing they too share a laptop).  In such instances, we need to know beforehand about the pair who will be attending and the understanding is that they will focus on advancing the student’s thesis work.

TO ENROL FOR THIS WORKSHOPS, CONTACT THE WOODHILL PARK RESEARCH RETREAT BY PHONING +64 9 411 7703.  ENROLMENTS WILL BE TAKEN ON A FIRST COME FIRST IN BASIS.

For the previous two years, we've held two-day Thesis Writers' Retreats twice per annum at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat.  The Thesis Writers' Retreat gives thesis writers an opportunity to make substantial progress on their thesis over a two-day period in a climate where others are also working hard at advancing their work.  A scholastic writing workshop can also be held on request and one-on-one assistance from Dr. Jens Hansen can be booked. 

The venue for the two days is the Woodhill Park Research Retreat which can accommodate a limited number of people for an overnight stay (seven maximum) but participants may wish to attend during the day only. 

We provide morning and afternoon teas and lunch for all as well as breakfast and dinner for those who elect to stay overnight.  We’re offering substantial discounts to those participating for the weekend and prices are shown in the full story. Click here to access an enrolment form.

Take part in a one-day workshop at the Woodhill Park Research Retreat during which Dr. Jens J. Hansen (from Woodhill Park) and Patrick Baker (of MindLogik) will showcase five business development and research packages, three of which have not previously been seen in New Zealand.