Editor’s note: Tim Macer, managing director of U.K. consulting firm meaning ltd., writes as an independent software analyst and advisor.

The Internet has become a very natural place to carry out qualitative research, as it is an environment where many harder-to-reach groups like senior professionals or the under 25s are to be found, not just in abundance but often in a conveniently loquacious mood. And therein lies the hidden cost of online qual - it can be easy and inexpensive to collect large amounts of textual data, without the normal burden of room hire or transcription fees. But the text arrives unobserved, often in a silent, relentless avalanche that can overwhelm the researcher. It takes time for the researcher to read and organize and assimilate all this data - there is no equivalent to being in on the groups and being able to get thinking right away on what to put into the report. The only way to the findings is by reading and reading and reading.

While some researchers experiment with using sentiment analysis or text mining, one overlooked remedy is that stalwart of the academic social researcher - NVivo - as it still places the researcher at the center of the interpretation while leaving plenty of room for her or his skill and intuition.

With the arrival of NVivo 9 at the end of last year, offering capabilities to work with many other kinds of data, I though it was time to see how it would shape up in the context of commercial market research - a sector where the software currently has few users.

On first opening the software, the interface can be bewildering - but think back to the first time you opened Word or Excel, if you can remember that far back. In NVivo, a number of sections and tree-structures in a panel on the left allow you to organize your work and a varying, context-specific set of tools are presented at the top, organized into tabs. The rest of the space is organiz...