I find that the QDA allows me to label and retrieve portions of text with some ease. Now I could cut all of that text up into little pieces, label them all, and sort them in various ways, but it would be a mess and it would be very difficult to control or understand. I am currently trying to understand a large number of hour-long narratives each of which is followed by about an hour-long interview. I use it for much the same reasons that I use a word processor instead of a typewriter - it makes some tasks easier. Nonetheless, I am currently using a QDA package.

The first point to be made about qualitative data analysis software is that it does NOT analyze qualitative data. Rather, what I want to know is: what are the best articles where QDA has really made a difference? What are the canonical articles? Is there a review article of the best of the best of QDA results? When Atlas.ti costs $1800 a pop, and Nvivo costs $600, doesn’t it seem like there should be a really clear list of all the super advances we have made because of it? Really, shouldn’t the “greatest hits of QDA” be something all anthropologists can easily recount? Now I could rail against the misplaced scientism and ideological blindness of QDA here, but I do not (want to) think this article was in any way exemplary. Conceptual distinctions were fuzzy, terms were assumed to refer to concepts when they may only have been co-occurent in different samples, the distinctions apparently provided by the software were fuzzy at best, at worst totally indistinct, and most annoying of all, the authors could not say what their methodology consisted in, only that they had used software to do something. In my estimation it added exactly nothing to the paper. etc.īut recently I reviewed a paper that employed QDA to try to make a point. There are lots of reasons: a) it’s proprietary b) it’s expensive c) none of my advisors or fellow students or any journal editors ever expected me too d) etc. Despite the fact that I am a Scholar of Teh Internets, I’ve never used QDA software. For years I’ve been asked by students “Which Qualitative Data Analysis software should I use?” I have no effing idea.

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