It's been a long journey, and never a boring one.
Tom and I now have no connection with QSR. Its new website
proclaims its "unique personality" and it's up to the users to
ensure that this still has connection with research goals.
For the record, here are the origins. One day, our kids
(then very young) went to sleep in the back of the car as we drove up to
Melbourne
from our beloved Surf Coast hideaway at
Aireys Inlet.
And I had time to talk about the currently impossible challenges in my five-year
funded qualitative study of suburbia. Tom and I were both on the faculty at
La Trobe University : I in Sociology and he in Philosophy. Basically, nobody should
ever have funded it – the data were far too rich and far too complex,
and would become far to varied to be adequately handled by the then
(70s) qualitative methods. Tom, who was getting interested in computer science but at
that stage had written only a one-page program, said he thought
that he could write a program to help me do what he thought I was trying
to do with that data! The rest is history. The book (Nobody’s Home,
OUP) didn’t come out till 1990 – that’s one of the many prices of
software development. And our research lives were changed.
Why try software, for interpretive, small scale
research, way back then, when computers were very challenging
assistants? That was the era of one-computer-per-university, and of
Teletype terminals printing on paper, or a "glass teletype", a
24x80-character non-graphical screen. I’ve always maintained that the critical event was that one
day our baby son ate a quotation. (Categorizing data meant bits of copy paper all over the floor
in heaps – remember?) Tom, being responsible for the child,
thought he should do something about my obvious need for tools for
handling data more safely and usefully.
Now for the more serious story. Why not try
software, if software might address some of the needs of researchers to
break down the barriers to rich analysis of rich data? World-wide,
qualitative research still languished as a low status, high demand,
poorly funded, low rewards branch of the social and health sciences –
and the world so clearly needed good qualitative research.
Once it was started, this adventure was
irresistible. We were heavily loaded young academics with a young
family, and the years up to the foundation of QSR - and indeed the next
ten in the company - were often a personal nightmare of overwork, no help in resources or time,
and travel timetables we can’t bear to remember. But our children assure
us they were unharmed, and the fascination of the task was unending. And they were so intellectually exciting,
those years! It was amazing to discover, at the Surrey conference in
1989, that others were working in other ways with software in this
field. It was wonderful to have, for a few precious years, a sense of
camaraderie and shared adventure with other software developers –
shortlived, as the pressures of competition and the apparently inevitable
intervention of business values cut through the heady excitement of
swapping ideas and arguing strategies.
In 1995 Tom and I took our own step into a company;
no choice there. We promised each other we would give it ten years – and
we did. In those years, QSR produced 6 revisions of the original NUD*IST
software – but still containing Tom’s code. And we created NVivo to
Tom’s design, the “next generation”, in 2001. Then another rev in 2003
and NV7 in 2005.
QSR grew in those ten years to a company of
between 20 and 40 staff, with self proclaimed world leading status in
qualitative software use. Tom conducted the massive comparative analysis
of the functions of both our products and brought them together in the
new one that became
NVivo 7, and we did the world trip to
launch it in March 2006. QSR changed greatly over those years, as did its
priorities, including entry to the lucrative market research market with
a product called XSight.
The Company today is a bit different
from the poky lab in Computer Science Dept at La Trobe University where NUD*IST
was developed. The software is a bit different too. No
more the late nights when NUD*IST acquired nice features:
like a button that said write
thesis.
or a menu item for Select
>
IDEOLOGY – if you selected “feminist”,
it would change all the occurrences of “him” to “her” etc.
For Tom and me, the basic goals stayed the same. Research software must
derive, inter alia, from a real understanding of what researchers were trying to
do – but not merely provide computerized ways of doing what they already do.
Always, it has to offer things they didn’t know they could have wanted to do, to
drive new ways of working. We very much hope those goals will continue to be
seen as relevant to the company now that we are independent of it.
The stages of development of QSR's academic software tools
have been documented by Tom in a paper in the special issue of
International Journal of Social Research Methodology; 5(3) from the
conference series on
Strategies in Qualitative Research with QSR
software. And those conferences, first at the IOE in London
University and then at Durham University, have been highlights of these adventure years. We wrote the
account of qualitative computing in 1994, “Using
Computers in qualitative analysis”, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S.
Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage
Publications, Newbury Park, 1st ed. It’s interesting to
revisit that paper. One of my own frustrations with this two-decade’s
experience is how inadequate the literature on qualitative computing was
and continues to be. It’s as though most of the textbook authors have
not noticed
there had been a revolution – but the researchers are living it. My own
texts have been an attempt to move the literature to dealing directly
with the challenges and new possibilities of qualitative research once
it is supported by software.
