Advice on research software

Posted by Armin
Aug 18, 2013 at 03:40 PM

22111 wrote:
We know there’s dedicated software for it, and we know it’s expensive.
>Since you post here, let’s assume you don’t want such a solution.

22111 wrote:
>could easily give you 2, 3 or 4 names of dedicated software (CT not
>being one of them as far as I know, but might “do” it, Dr Andus knows it
>thoroughly, so he only could tell), but those are in the range of 1,000
>to 3,000 dollars / euro, except for students (which have the problem
>that in most cases, their cheap versions do expire rather soon, it’s not
>as with MS and such).

You mean software for qualitative data analysis (QDA-Software)? Examples of this kind of software are MAXQDA and ATLAS.ti
Indeed, they are really really expensive. I had the chance to test MAXQDA in university for some time and it is made for qualitative academic research: analysing interviews (transcriptions) or documents (now even videos or images). For text analysis, their focus is on coding words or paragraphs as 22111 illustrated above. QDA-Software let you organise and categorize your data according to your own code preferences.

Although Zoot is by no means QDA software, you can do quite a lot of qualitative text analysis with Zoot, too. Of course, Zoot lacks special features like visualization, presentation or quantitative analysis of your coding results. However, the price of Zoot, which has a lot more features, is very small, when you see the prices of MAXQDA or ATLAS.ti.

Best regards
Armin