Word processors are a boon in storing, organizing and keeping track of your data. Obviously, you need to observe good housekeeping practices and should take advice on how you can survive possible hard disk crashes, loss, theft, fire, etc. Essentially, this means having multiple copies of everything, regularly kept up to date in more than one location, and in both paper and computer file versions. Word processors can also help with the coding task through ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ function. In this way, it is easy to build up files containing all instances of a particular coding while retaining the original file with the original data to which codes have been added.
The live issue is whether you go beyond this to use one of the many specialist software packages designed to help with qualitative data analysis. Box 14.3