Had a meeting at long last with my supervisors and one of the things we discussed was my data. I have yet to start to analyse this, some won't be that much of a problem, but I have collected close to 5,000 requests and responses. These cover a range of things, from requests for help with practical work, to best buys for equipment via general work type questions. My aim is to sort these into categories, and then divide them further into sub categories, followed by looking at the type and number of responses to each question. Supervisors suggested things like nvivo etc, but I am not sure they will be suitable as I think they are much more likely to be of use for conventional interviews. A long time ago when I worked in a hospital lab, we tried to use software to try to find a relationship between about 2,000 femoral heads, we duly put in all the data, size surface, etc. etc. - and every single one was given a different category, which was no use at all, and we ended up doing it manually. I'm really in favour of doing the same here, getting it all printed out and sorted that way. Could I justify this on the grounds that it would be less likely to produce errors, or is there any software that would cope with this?

Nvivo is really good, I've used it for transcribing interview transcripts. Depends what you want to do really. I only had 15 interviews of 1 hour each, but that was still a huge amount of text to code. The best thing about Nvivo is that everything is stored and coded in one file, so you can bring up everything you've coded to the same code immediately (no cutting and pasting in word). So the question is, is it just about cost? At my uni we can buy Nvivo for just £2 so it's not a major investment. It's also easy to learn as it works like word, and there are online tutorials to work through. See how much it costs before making the decision.