Qualitative software
Qualitative software, known in academic research as CAQDAS (computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software), helps researchers organize, code, search and interpret qualitative data such as interview transcripts, documents, images and video.
How it works
The CAQDAS Networking Project at the University of Surrey, whose founders Nigel Fielding and Ray Lee coined the term, counts a program as CAQDAS if it handles at least one kind of qualitative data, such as text, graphics, audio or video, and offers some of six kinds of tool: content searching, linking, coding, querying, writing and annotation, and mapping. In practice analysts import transcripts, apply codes to passages, keep a codebook, write memos and run queries that pull every passage carrying one code or a combination of codes.
For teams, the University of Illinois library's guide describes two setups. Some programs give each researcher a copy of the project file to merge later, and web-based ones let several coders work in one project at the same time.
A worked example
At a public health agency, 4 analysts share one project to code 120 interview transcripts against a codebook of 48 codes. A query for passages coded both "cost" and "rural" returns 212 of them in seconds; pulling the same set from printed transcripts would take days.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
Pulse's themes arrive already grouped from transcripts it collected itself, the starting layer a CAQDAS project would otherwise build by hand before deeper coding in whatever software the team prefers.