Hi all

Im a Phd student and starting on my thematic analysis now after data collection. The nature of my research is purely qualitative and I have one hour long interview transcripts that I plan on coding using NVivo eventually. I have noticed AI is a but helpful to streamline my thoughts. As a researcher I dont really trust chatgpt with anything lol and am definitely not looking for AI to do my analysis. I was wondering if anyone has used any softwares that can identify patterns or themes etc roughly? I dont want AI to do my work and I am not relying on it I just want to use it to understand my data better if that helps. I overthink a lot so i have noticed notebooklm helps me structure transcripts etc. For the lack of a better statement lol I just want to speed up the process a bit if it makes sense. Any help, advice or recommendations would be great!

I have been trying to shop around, but it seems like the most popular one doesn't work on mac, and I'm worried about not being able to effectively back up my data with some of the options I've seen.

My situation is that I'm writing ethnographic fieldnotes, so I want to have the ability to make discrete entries, but ideally also the option to code them.

I am also open to suggestions for free software/websites that would be useful for essentially making diary entries, which can easily be flipped through, and later inputted into maxqda when I eventually shell out for a license.

I may just end up using google docs, but it's very frustrating that my university doesn't provide licenses for this stuff. If you have any advice on how to get my university to pay for it that's also helpful!