What is the Concepts view?
The Concepts view is a useful report to illustrate what words and phrases appear most prominently in your textual data. With this tool, you can code entire segments of data containing the same word or phrase, no matter where it is in your project, and create a thematic analysis faster than before.
What makes a concept?
When data is processed through Concepts, the significant noun phrases (for example, health care system) are detected in order to identify the most frequently occurring concepts in the data. In the second step, the concepts and their frequencies are collected across all files in the set being processed.
ATLAS.ti actively filters the concepts — only the most relevant concepts are presented in the results. You can review the concepts in their surrounding context and then decide which concepts you want to code automatically.
How do I create a Concepts view?
Concepts is one of the views available to you in ATLAS.ti Web. All your views are accessible by clicking on the bar chart icon in the left-hand toolbar in your project.
In the top-right corner, click on "+ New View" and select Concepts from the pop-up menu.
This will create a new view, which you can name as desired by clicking on "Untitled Concepts View" in the top-left corner.
You will now need to define the scope of the data you want the Concepts view to analyze. You can choose from codes, code groups, documents, or document groups. Toggle the entities you want to include in the analysis in the respective pop-up menus.
The resulting view will look like a word cloud, with the most frequently occurring concepts appearing larger in text and closer to the center of the cloud.
Remember to save your view by clicking on "Save" in the top-right corner. You can also undo any unsaved changes by clicking on the down arrow next to save and clicking on "Discard changes."
Using the Concepts view
Clicking on each word in the cloud will bring up the relevant segments of text that include the selected concept. The resulting list will show each data segment, the document in which it is located, and any codes or comments already attached to it. From here, you can view the details or add codes or comments to any individual data segment in the list without having to navigate to the relevant document.
The Concepts view also allows for auto-coding of multiple data segments at once. Simply toggle the checkboxes of the segments you wish to code, press the settings button (indicated by three dots) in the resulting text box that appears, and select "+ Add code" to bring up the code dialog box.
You can also click on "Quote...results" in the top-right corner to bring up the code dialog box to code all of the results in the list at once.
Other options
In the top-right corner, the Export button (indicated by a down arrow) will allow you to save all results in your list if you have chosen an entry from the concepts cloud. The results will output to an Excel spreadsheet that will list each data segment, the document in which it is located, and any codes or comments applied to it.
The Settings button (indicated by the three dots) will bring up a pop-up menu, where you can add a comment to your view, see the latest save information about the view, or delete the view altogether.