Software Resources |
Chapter ResourcesTip: Click on each chapter heading to expand and view the extract from that chapter. Click again to collapse. Chapter 4: Qualitative Research DesignAt the early stage of a project, you need to know what approaches are supported by software? What advances in method does software offer? And what are the traps and temptations to which you should be alerted? Approaches Early in a project, important tasks are organizational. Taking the steps to a good research design as described in this chapter, you will make a lot of records of your thinking, reading, scoping of the project, and planning. Research proposals, grant applications, and literature reviews are the intended outputs. The inputs can be messy and confusing. Qualitative software is designed to help you handle messy inputs, so it will assist with these early records. Novice researchers often are misled into thinking they have to have "real" data before they can start using software. But there is no need to start by storing research design records separately from later records of interviews or field research. If you do so, it will be much harder to access these together throughout the project. Start by learning how your software will store records and allow you to see them separately—in folders, sets, or groups. If you set up a project carefully, you will be able to access your plans and reviews alongside the other data records you will create when you commence interviewing or field research. So the contribution of software at the research design stage is as a reliable (but not rigid) container for plans, early considerations, and topics. You need to learn now
If you are planning to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of analysis, it is important to build into your research design consideration of the ways you will "mix" these. This will involve moving data between software packages… Good mixed method research does not merely juxtapose two projects but also integrates them. To do this, you will need to plan, from the start of your research design, for the appropriate data and staging of analysis. Advances Computer software cannot design your project, but it can assist greatly in the data management tasks at this stage. Once you learn software skills, you will find that starting early in software has great advantages. And more important, starting early in software does not disadvantage you. Software tools are now far more fluid than those first developed for qualitative research. A good software package will allow you to create a project and then later change practically all aspects of it as your ideas about the data and analysis grow. At the early stage of design, you can store drafts and estimates of project stages, and using the tools taught in later tutorials, you will be able to link them and shape the ideas that inform your design. As you work the ideas and issues, you will be able to see more clearly what design decisions must be made or how, for example, you can design the sample of your study to encounter the range of discovered issues. In the early stages of research design, the computer offers storage for documents and ideas—and the ability to link them by coding the relevant passages of documents and the relevant ideas so that all the relevant material can be retrieved later. The research design can be informed and directed by systematic storage of early explorations of the topic, serious reflection on the range of options for approaching it, and informed decision making. Alerts
Chapter 5: Making DataAs qualitative data records are created, any researcher is challenged to manage their complexity and richness well and responsibly. Software is obviously an aid for certain tasks. Qualitative packages specialize in ways of creating, importing, handling, and managing data records on the computer. Approaches Almost all software designed for use by qualitative researchers will handle text. (Most handle "rich text" and/or word processor and other formats.) Importantly, programs have different ways of including or linking to nontext records such as audiotapes or videotapes. If you wish to use such records as primary data, without reducing them to representations, explore software that will allow you to retain them whole and to code "streaming" tape. All qualitative software will also have some ways to store your reflections on the data, your early ideas as they happen, ensuring that these impressions will not be lost and that you can revisit your account of your data making as the project grows. Explore your software to get a feel for the processes of making data records and handling them on the computer. Your software should support all the following processes, which you need to learn: How to create and edit documents in your qualitative software program, instead of in a word processor How to import or link to all data files so they can be coded and analyzed in your project How to store information about the data records and cases they represent (e.g., demographic data) How to handle nontext records (e.g., photos, videos) so they can be integrated with text How to store your reflections in memos How to add annotations and edit How to link between documents or parts of data records Advances The list of software functions above includes much that could not be done before computers. When documents were on paper, storing them and marking them up was awkward and sometimes very time-consuming, but it could be done. On the other hand, changing them, finely annotating them and accessing those comments, storing information about them, and linking that data with statistical analysis were often practically impossible. Methods change with technology, and these lists offer the first glimpse of the effects of software on qualitative method. You can do much more with your data once they are on the computer, and, of course, you can do it with much more data. This does not mean you should! Alerts Four cautions apply here, and they all concern researchers' tendencies to try to fit research to computer programs rather than making the programs work for their projects. Data types, the volume of data, and the data's heterogeneity should be driven by the research goals and method, not by the computer program. Be very careful not to skew your project to what the computer seems to want. If your program won't handle the sort of data your project requires, devise a new strategy using the program's tools (and tell other researchers about it) or move to another program.
Chapter 6: CodingIn Chapter 4, we introduced the ways of gathering the preliminary material that lead to research topic and question and using the computer to handle and manage data records as data are made. Now we go on to coding. The computer can take much of the clerical burden from each of the modes of coding—but it leaves you with the task of interpretation. Approaches All software packages support coding, but they support it in different ways. Many have a choice of ways of coding. In Chapter 5, we discussed management of data records by the "descriptive coding." This is usually done by import of attributes and their values for the relevant documents or cases. Learn to do this routinely, before you start topic and analytic coding. Software will support the following processes, which you need to learn: How to do topic coding by making and defining categories and managing them as they develop How to do topic coding automatically, by section or by text search How to do analytic coding, which includes discovering and developing categories, linking them to memos, and using the computer to support the discovery and exploration of themes How to review the data coded at these categories, online, or away from the computer, whether text or visual data (such as photographs or video segments). Most software will also support rethinking these data segments, recoding them, and developing the concepts they represent or illustrate. Advances You don't need qualitative software to code. .. Before software, coding was done with pens, index cards, and files. Some instructors insist that students code by hand first, to learn how to think when coding without the distraction of the software... So why use specially designed software? For the researcher, there are three critically important differences: Computers code easily and swiftly, so coding with software is much faster and more efficient than coding on paper. Your interpretation can be far more easily and immediately stored as coded data. Computers can store far more information than paper files can. Effectively, good software has no limit to the number of coding categories you can make or the amount of data you can code at them. Coding data—that is, the categories you create and the selections you wish to code at them—are stored by software as pointers to the coded segments, not as marked-up or cut-up extracts of text. This information is much more flexible, and much more easily altered, than are paper records. Unlike the filing cabinet, qualitative software can easily take you from the coded segment to the context. Some software can show you "live" all material coded at a topic or concept, allowing you to rethink, revise coding, and "code on"... to further, new dimensions of the concept. With specialized software tools, you can ask questions about patterns of coding that were literally impossible with paper records. Qualitative researchers usually need to go beyond their first coding. It's not enough to get in one place everything said about a problem. You are more likely to want to know, for example, when people were coded as saying they had this problem, what they said—anywhere in their interview—about their trust of this advice. Alerts The greatest dangers of qualitative computing lie in the facility, capacity, and patience of the computer! Coding is essential to most methods, but it can become a trap if you are not aware of these risks.
Chapter 7: AbstractingThe primary difference between commercial database software and specialized qualitative software is that the latter is designed to help with the processes of analysis and abstraction. Software packages designed for qualitative research will store not only materials but also ideas, concepts, issues, questions, and theories. The primary difference between using a computer system in qualitative research and using a manual system is that the computer gives a different sort of access, allowing for flexible growth in the webs of ideas the data are producing and enabling the researcher to manage those burgeoning ideas by storing them, defining them, accessing them, and writing about them. The contribution software can make at the early stages of abstracting is considerable. All researchers are diffident about first ideas. If scribbled on stick-on labels, the ideas may be lost. The computer makes it easy for the researcher to store them, define them, write about and revisit them, and revise and review them as ideas build up. Approaches Your computer software will offer ways to make, manage, and develop categories and to work with them from the early stages of your project. And all software offers some ways of asking questions about the relations between the categories you are reflecting on. With your qualitative software, or other software for modelling, explore computer-based diagramming. This allows you to "play" with ideas in ways that are impossible with manual methods, including layering, labelled links, and live access to data. Software will support the following processes, which you need to learn: How to manage and move the categories for abstracting from your data How to store definitions and how to describe and write memos about them and log changes How to use search and query tools to explore the relations of categories How to model your first ideas about the topic and the hunches growing from your exploration of the data Advances These are the areas where software has opened entirely new ways of working with qualitative data. As your project progresses, you will learn the uses of these tools to assist your exploration of the data, checking of your hunches, and developing of theories and reporting of patterns and themes. Category management is much more possible when the researcher is using software. Find how, with your software, you can do the following: Flexibly copy, move, and combine coding categories without losing coding Link logging of project process Search the text of documents Expand search results to appropriate context Automatically code the results so they can become the basis for another question Make matrices that demonstrate patterns and allow the researcher to go to each cell to see what those people said about this issue Search and query the data (e.g., software supports creating, and optionally saving, questions about patterns of coding) Models and diagrams were always part of qualitative research, but computer-based modeling offers many advances, for example: Showing connections you made by coding or linking Allowing the researcher to open data items from within the model to explore them further Alerts Because these new tools are so exciting, be careful to use them thoughtfully and flexibly.
Chapter 10: Writing It UpYour writing will, of course, be done on a computer. Word processors have remade the tasks of composing, editing, and revising. Approaches Your word processor will easily receive the data and reflections from your project if it has been created and managed in qualitative software. At any stage of your writing, you should use the ability to make reports of your data or the passages coded or discovered in your analysis. Advances Throughout this book we have encouraged you to record your project and your steps in analysis in a "trail." If appropriate, this can include the recording of your checks on coder consistency and sample diversity. This "log" can be efficiently maintained in your software, with links to the relevant data or categories described... Your software's search tools have many tasks in this stage... Use them for locating relevant data or quotations, for checking the patterns you are discerning and the adequacy of your coverage of critical issues, or for finding exceptions to a generalization. Don't underestimate the uses of text search to check whether a "dominant" theme really is dominant! As you start the final reporting task, make good use of your software's data management and search tools to take stock of your memos and log trail writings so you can account for all the insights or concerns recorded during analysis... Alerts
Chapter 12: Getting StartedChoose your software early and become competent in computer use and all the relevant software before data collection begins. If you wait until you are making data, you will risk damaging or even losing files.
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Authors: Lyn Richards and Janice M. Morse Pub Date: April 2012 Pages: 336 |
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