Progam with QDA Qualitative Data Analysis features? Coding/tagging blocks of text?

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Posted by Foolness
Oct 4, 2012 at 06:32 AM

Note that I don’t know anything about QDA.

The set of articles are a good underrated topic but many of the things felt imbalanced.

The installation portion felt too long and tailored towards an extreme subset of a a general audience but then Atlas.ti and NVivo were too quickly name dropped as if the audience is supposed to be an expert of QDA and there was a lack of true detailed comparison in the transition from one software to another especially as no true specific subject appeared to be needed to be researched or requiring of an enlightenment. We’re never really sure if you were making a personal wiki on a subject you know of and then just adding supplementary notes or whether you were brainstorming new perspectives as you add data into the software. It was like a general project template that had a bit of an obscure software comparison but none of the desperate qualifier that comes with a user needing to tackle an issue that they seriously need to research.

There were also too many points that felt like CT was a supportive software. The flow chart focus obviously wasn’t made in CT and most of the CT transitions were described rather than animated thus leaving behind a strong workflow hole where in you saw the finished product but you don’t know what the psychological mindset benefits are. It really was less Design and more Getting Started on this software by inserting a vague topic to research with little respect given to the diverse natures behind a person’s learning process and the diverse nature of how a topic can be researched. (A biography for a person for example can be easily made by a researcher but the subtle distinction between basic and informed vs in-depth while still being accurate and telling multiple stories from different perspectives is very important for an outliner to be able to distinguish and warn the user of.)

Finally, from a blog design PoV, there were points were it felt you were getting lazy and were being held back by the image insertion.

I’m not saying you’re writing style is absolutely horrible for your target audience or even for random visitors because it’s certainly not going to get many critics from this forum but when you have a writer start using terms like daisy-chaining and naming sections DRA case study (instead of an actual test subject) it’s just a step above from the generic demo examples provided by the software maker themselves. There’s some value there as a preview but there’s also an apathy that comes with the supposed intention of helping someone design their own research.

It’s like the software isn’t supposed to carry the brunt of the data. It’s just supposed to be a bag. You put something in. You close it. You reopen it. Very un-research-like in a real tough research subject like when dual comparison of multiple data points is needed by the user to view the outline in such a way that they can easily compare multiple facets without falling into biases. I’m not saying you, as an actual researcher, with the IQ or EQ or other types of strengths and associated knowledge that CT will personally bog you down. But the overall text you have written is very common of text that bog people down who are curious about the subject of say QDA but don’t possess the knowledge, training, intelligence and critical thinking to just insert things into CT. In short, the text you have written does not present the evidence to the audience of why CT should be used for QDA. A question you yourself imposed at the beginning of the tutorial.

This doesn’t mean the internet isn’t full of these types of articles. I already said you might not receive much critique here. As the minority though, rare subjects such as the one you have written is sad to witness go down the drain despite tackling a very important subject in the realm of outlining. There really could be more written on how your mind interprets importing as a process of reduction. Or how you pre-shape your final outline considering researchers (general ones not QDA) are supposed to treat findings as neutral objects with no final predetermined form. Or how a specific non-data could be imported incrementally (especially when the data still doesn’t exist and is being collected solely to be stored in CT). There’s tons of those questions left into the mystery of your mind.

Posted by Foolness
Oct 4, 2012 at 06:36 AM

Forgot to add this: My biggest personal critique though is that there is no indication in the articles themselves of now no longer needing to read any of your posts in this forum related to CT or QDA.

For a set of articles of that length, a topic absorbing all the things you’ve written here and planting a type of study or paper or summary of all that has passed would have been more true to answering the question of why to use CT for QDA than what you have written.

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 4, 2012 at 08:50 AM

Foolness wrote:
>Forgot to add this: My biggest personal critique though is that there is no indication
>in the articles themselves of now no longer needing to read any of your posts in this
>forum related to CT or QDA.
> >For a set of articles of that length, a topic absorbing all
>the things you’ve written here and planting a type of study or paper or summary of all
>that has passed would have been more true to answering the question of why to use CT for
>QDA than what you have written.

Thanks for your comments. You make a lot of valid points and if I was making a living doing software tutorial writing then I would certainly go back and address those issues. However, as this is not my job or business, it is what it is for now, as I don’t have more time to keep rewriting them.

But I’m happy to address any specific questions about using the software and the coding and research process itself. I may add more posts in the future which might clarify some things retrospectively as well.

In the end though I’m afraid it is the prospective interested user who will need to make the effort to make sense of it. This is for a very specialised and narrow (but motivated) audience: for PhD students and other researchers who have a genuine problem of being frustrated with the dedicated CAQDAS tools on the market for a host of reasons (cost, technical rigidity, implicit philosophical bias etc.) and are looking for an alternative.

Having said that, I could imagine other types of users making some sense of it as well for totally unrelated uses that I never thought of.

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 6, 2012 at 01:15 PM

I’ve added a more generalised model of the qualitative data analysis process I have described in my CT tutorials, with a chart that hopefully expresses things more clearly:

http://drandus.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/caqdas-model-for-connectedtext/

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 6, 2012 at 06:36 PM

Nice and clear! What did you use to make the chart? VUE again?

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