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With my husband
Tom, I've been involved in
qualitative computing since about 1980. From a
windowless university lab to the increasingly corporate world of QSR
International - and out again! Coming up - my plenary to
the
ACSPRI conference in
December, talking about what I learned from that
experience.
No
more QSR help!
It has proved very hard to establish that I really
exited from QSR. I still field an amazing amount of email from
researchers about its software, or its changing character. My thanks to all who've
sent splendid messages and my best wishes to all who are using the software
and have been helped by me. But if you have help queries, please go
straight to the company's support line. If you want your views to be
heard on directions the company is taking, please use its online Forum.
Tom Richards and I founded QSR, in 1995,
to develop the software we were
creating, NUD*IST and then later, NVivo. We left the company at the
beginning of 2006, and as of July 2007 have no connection with it, by
ownership, employ or consultancy. We have no responsibility for its
product development since then, for its approach to selling or for its
marketing claims and language. We still hope that the
software we created will continue to be developed with innovation and
understanding of the requirements of research. But our heartfelt
advice is that it's up to the researchers to ensure that developers who
are not themselves researchers get that message.
Progress in qualitative
computing?
Qualitative computing is well over two decades old.
Here’s my assessment of those 20 years.
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Programs have progressed dramatically and, increasingly,
divergently. (To find out the latest, go to the
CAQDAS site, or the
TQM conference.) There
is now much less homogeneity, much more variety and
innovation. The processes of
developing software were hugely exciting, and
the excitement will remain where there is innovation.
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But
research tools require constant, collaborative and
critical interaction between developers and
researchers if innovation is to continue. Software
users must be sharply alert to the danger of corporate
comfort in market position and
profits. Max Weber was right about routinization!
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Researchers need and will use qualitative computing
tools. They need and deserve relevant teaching and
writing on methods. There is precious little. And
there will be less if developers are able to sell
software without supporting it adequately, and users
accept marketing self-promotion as a substitute for
intelligent discussion.
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Debate
about the impact of computing on qualitative research
risked getting stuck in the mud of methodological territorialism
and conservatism, weighed down by technical
incompetence and bogged in the boredom of a
development process that is more about marketing
claims than research challenges. It mustn't! |
I think it matters very greatly
if researchers with rich data are often unable to manage even
basic analysis. And about serious ethical problems. When
you move outside the academic structure, people are much
more honest about these. So I started long years of trying
to help novice and experienced researchers from the
highly competent who just wanted to get the most from
software tools to what one of our programmers referred
to as the terminally confused, who had no training in
handling qualitative data and were trying to learn it
from a software package. And to create
networks and events
that
promoted critical, innovative thinking about software.
For an up to date
overview of the current programs available, by the
trainers who run the active and important CAQDAS
Networking Project:
Choosing a CAQDAS package - A working paper, by Ann
Lewins and Christina Silver
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