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

Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 4, 2012 at 05:42 PM

Carrot wrote:
>As for
>my “qualitative research philosophy”, I don’t really have one- just sort-of a
>grounded-theory
>approach to code the data based on concepts that come out of the
>interview material. Once the data is coded,
>then to see what codes overlap. I’m sure
>the process will teach me a great deal about themes in my data.

That’s pretty much my approach (a grounds-up ethnographic approach).

I forgot to mention that the “Include” feature is another critical element of CT’s analytical capabilities. It allows you to extract bits of a document and include them in another document. So you can collect similarly themed (coded) sub-headings from several documents and construct a new page out of them. This is what I call abstraction by way of extraction.

As for getting started with CT, it’s been already discussed on another thread here. It’s the most difficult aspect of CT because it’s somewhat idiosyncratic, plus being a generalist wiki, it’s probably impossible to include instructions for all potential uses. It took me several years and several false starts before I realised what CT is and how I can use it. Interestingly though, after the initial breakthrough it was very quick to get up and running. Folks at the CT forum have been extremely helpful. One just needs to get stuck in and start doing things and start working through problems and learn it step by step.

I’m obviously a big fan, although I’ve only been using it since March. But it’s kind of saving my life because I was drowning under data and didn’t know how to pull everything together for my PhD project. I was expecting NVivo to do that for me but it wasn’t right.