Use of a computer software program for qualitative analyses--Part 1: Introduction to NUD.IST

The NUD.IST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing) program is recognized as one of the most efficient software programs for qualitative data analysis because it dramatically reduces the clerical tasks of cut and paste for coding and retrieval in text. However, little literature related to NUD.IST and its use in qualitative analysis is available to nurse researchers. Thus, the purposes of the first part of a two-part article are to describe the features of NUD.IST to nurse researchers and to present how NUD.IST was used in a qualitative study of dyspnea stimuli. In managing the qualitative data of dyspnea stimuli, NUD.IST 3.0 was effective in extracting, retrieving, and tracking text segments as well as identifying commonalties or patterns in data quickly.