Using CAQDAS in the analysis of foundation trust hospitals in the National Health Service: mustard seed searches as an aid to analytic efficiency

This article reflects on the development of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) briefly before describing how the software can be harnessed to aid the process of research. It shows how data from a multi-user project looking at governance in UK Foundation Trust hospitals was enhanced and made clearer through the application of a specific method of gathering and coding data using a qualitative data analysis software package: Applying searches based on word frequency counts within NVivo 8 provided an initial categorisation of topics in an efficient manner allowing for a targeted examination of the overall data. This technique has been called by us the Mustard seed approach as it starts small and builds into something bigger over time.