Links that are unique to a PD

[Sally]

Hello again,

I am working on coding interview transcripts which all explore a patient experience with their illness.

There are multiple relationships that patients identify between different concepts, for example that "symptom X" causes "feeling Y". The symptoms and feelings are used many times across PDs. One PD = one patient.

I have been using the network view function to represent these relationships by creating a relation for each type of relationship I want to visualize and then making the link in the network view.

My problem comes however from the fact that I don't want Atlas.ti to automatically show the links established for one PD when I want to see the network view of another PD. For example, in PD # 1, I have coded that "symptom X" causes "feeling Y". However in PD # 2, this link does not exist. Yet, when I use the network view, with codes "symptom X" and "feeling Y" taken from the PD #2, the link automatically appears, as it was created previously in PD #1.

If there a way to work around this? I want to be able to establish links which are unique to a PD and not general to the whole project. Basically a "filter" type option per PD for links.

The only things I could think of were:

- to create relations for each PD, but since I have 20 PDs, this will end of with around 100 relations (5 basic relations x 20 PDs...). This many relations is too much to deal with.
- to create codes which are unique to each PD, ie "PD 1_Symptom X", "PD 2_Symptom X"; but this will result about 4000 codes (200 codes x 20 PDs). Again, too many codes to deal with...
- creating a new project of each PD and then later merging all projects into a new "master" project, but I don't know how that would work as there will be the same codes/relations used in all PDs...having never done project merging, I'm also reluctant to try this approach.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Kind regards

Sally

[SFriese]

Dear Sally,

you need to work around this - the network applies to your entire project and for the computer relating x to y using relation A in one PD but using relation B in another is not logic. This is why it is not allowed.

I suggest that you enrich your networks by adding an explanatory code why X is related to Y in PD 1, and not for PD2, and using relation B for PD3.

There is probably a reason why this is the case in PD1. So create a code for it (even though if you have not been using this code for coding)

then you can link code x ---if ---- context/reason/cirumstances (what ever it might be) ------leads to -------> Code Y

then code X is not related to Code Y directly, but via a "dummy" code and it will not automatically show up in all networks.

the merging ID will not work as it would mix up everything again. As there cannot be conflicting relations, the target project will solve any conflict. This means the relation that exist in the target project will be used in the merged project.

kind regards, Susanne