3.4. Attributes
Attributes are variables associated with files, cases or journals. They can be useful to add context when interpeting your analysis. Open the Manage Attributes dialog. You can add, delete, rename and add memo notes to attributes.
You can right-click on a numeric attribute to convert to Character.
The only options for attributes are numeric and character. There are no options for boolean, date or time or specific numeric types such as integer. However, if you are running SQL queries you may need to cast the numeric attribute to an Integer or Real: cast(my_var as integer).
Attributes can be added in the Mange Files, Manage Cases or Mange Journals sections by clicking on the (x) button.
Attributes can be imported from a survey, and also from an REFI-QDA project file (REFI-QDA is experimental).
It is not the intention for QualCoder to perform statistical analyses of the attributes. It would be preferable to use dedicated statistical software such as R (https://www.r-project.org/) or other such software.
Attributes can also be added or deleted using the Manage > Manage Attributes option:
In this area you can delete attributes. But even though you can delete reference attributes, we recommend that you do not do this, unless you are certain all your references are not needed. These are prefixed with 'Ref_'.
