Working With Groups

Groups in ATLAS.ti help you to sort, organize and filter the various entities. Groups are available for documents, codes, memos, and networks.

Common to all groups are:

  • An entity can be sorted into multiple groups. For example if you sort a document into the group gender::female, it can also be sorted into other groups like location::urban, or family status::single.
  • If you click on a group in a manager, you activate a filter (see below). Then only the items that are in the selected groups are displayed.
  • You can combine groups using Boolean operators. See for example Exploring Coded Data (see the main manual)..

There are no groups for quotations, as codes already fulfil this function. Codes group quotations that have a similar meaning. Therefore instead of groups, you see the codes in the side panel of the Quotation Manager (see the main manual)..

Application of Document Groups

Often data come from different sources, locations, respondents with various demographic backgrounds etc. To facilitate the handling of the different types of data, they can be organized into document groups.

You can also use document groups for administrative purposes in team projects if different coders should code different documents. You can then create a group containing all documents for coder 1, another group containing the documents for coder 2 and so on.

Document Group Examples

Another application is the use of document groups for analytic comparisons in the Code Document Table (see the main manual)..

Group Comparisons in the Code-Document Table

Document groups can also be added to Networks (see the main manual). and you can show which codes have been applied to which group.

Document Groups in Networks

Application of Code Groups

Code groups can be used to sort and organize codes in the Code Manager. Code groups facilitate the navigation of codes in the Code Manager as local filter.

Code Groups as local filter

Code groups can be used as global filters in analysis.

Code Groups as Global Filter in Networks

Code groups can also be used in the Code Document Table (see the main manual). for case comparisons.

Code Groups in the Code-Document Table

Users often mistake code groups as a kind of higher order code, which they are not. They do however can be quite useful in building a coding system.