For the uninitiated - okay, most of you sane people out there with a life - CAQDAS, as I discovered only recently, is an acronym for Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software. Since I aspire to be a qualitative researcher, and a bit of a (marginal) tech geek, then the prospect of computer software that can assist me in analyzing data is very appealing. So this is what this post is going to be about... fair warning to those of you (okay everyone apart from my course instructor) who is already dozing off.
Actually, just to backtrack a little, although I refer to myself as a qualitative researcher, to be honest, I am really a mixed methodologist, since my dissertation research and therefore my expertise will need to address both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Quantitative methods are more familiar to me with my biological sciences background, and, if I wanted an easier life, I should probably have stuck to quantitative methods for my doctoral research. But then, if I wanted an easier life, I probably wouldn't be attempting a PhD in the first place, and I find qualitative methods intuitively appealing. From a more scholarly perspective, I think that my research questions about the career choices of female veterinary students in the context of feminization of the profession, are best explored, at least initially, through open-ended interviews and discussion with a few students. Then I will develop the emerging themes into a more quantitative, national survey. Anyway, with that in mind, since quantitative methods rely pretty heavily on specialist softare packages such as SPSS these days, I figured that qualitative research should be able to do the same.
So, how does all my methodological angst relate to CAQDAS? Well, one of the points made in the article, by Koenig, that we read for class, was that since there are so many different versions of CAQDA software out there, it is important to match the right software to the methodological and theoretical approaches of your research. Although this is a very appealing sort of symmetry, if I may be cynical, I suspect that the reason there are so many options for software on the market is less to do with methodological diversity, and more to do with the fact that none of them are clearly superior to the others, with all the features that you need them to do. The other thing that rapidly becomes apparent in reading this article, is that mundane things such as the platforms supported by each software will limit selection significantly, especially if you are a Mac user - which I am. Of the long list of software reviewed by the article, only two can be used with Mac OS X - HyperRESEARCH and TAMS.
This surprised me, since it is increasingly rare to encounter Mac-Windows incompatibility with software these days, and this was another indication that the development of this kind of software is still in its infancy. It is my impression (not that I have much to back this up with) that more established types of software are pretty universally available on both platforms these days. Another indication that CAQDAS is still evolving pretty rapidly was that many of the features that were considered lacking in HyperRESEARCH by Koenig, have recently been addressed in a new upgrade, according to the Researchware website. Amongst these updates are the addition of hierarchical (rather than flat) coding capabilities; better linking to the same company's transcription software HyperTRANSCRIBE, to allow display and synchronization of transcriptions to the original audio or video media; and, support for Rich Text Format (rtf) files. These were all issues cited as being a problem for this software by Koenig, and so I am encouraged that they have been addressed. I am intrigued, also, by the fact that HyperRESEARCH has the ability to allow you to diagrammatically link different codes, in a relatively straightforward manner. I am a big fan of concept mapping, and use IHMC Cmap tools software quite a lot to map out my research, so I am curious to see how this works.
I think that one of the main problems in distinguishing between all the options for CAQDA software, and for fully understanding Koenig's article, is that I don't fully understand the process of coding and analyzing qualitiative research data yet. All of the other software that we have surveyed in this class has been designed to perform a function that I have tried to do in other ways - organize and cite references, organize notes, and so on. But the whole concept of coding is still pretty fuzzy to me, so it is really hard for me to distinguish the pros and cons of different features of these kinds of software. In this arena I am still stuck in the dualistic cognitive learning phase where I just want someone to tell me what to think.
HyperRESEARCH is relatively expensive, at least for a poor student ($199 without the transcription software), but they do have a free trial version. Coincidentally, when I did a search through my university's Office of Information Technology, to see if HyperRESEARCH is available under an institutional license (which it is not), I came across an article written by my PhD advisor, which used HyperRESEARCH for the data analysis. It looks as if that was an older version, but I will be interested hear what she thought of it. It is not encouraging that she was asking ME about CAQDAS the other day, knowing that I was taking this class, and because she had just invested in a copy of NVivo, a rival system.
In the meantime, I have downloaded the trial copy, and I will give it a try, especially after we have gone over some basic techniques for using analysis software in class on Tuesday. I may report back. On the other hand, if it crashes my computer and destroys all my data, I may be gone for some time.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Running, Freedom and Power
I was at about mile 2 of my run on a bitterly cold Saturday, and quite enjoying myself, when I turned the corner of my 5 mile loop and came face to face with the wind. A bitter, biting, breathtaking wind. And I thought, 'Whoa! Not so much fun, now, is it, Clare?!' And then I remembered Michael Kimmel's article "With the Wind at my Back," an article that finally helped this middle class, white English girl, start to understand race and privilege in America. Kimmel's analogy of privilege being like a wind behind your back, that you don't really notice, unless you are one of those having to work against it, really hit home with me because I am a runner.
I am a runner not so much in the sense that I get out there regularly, although I try to. More importantly, I consider myself a runner because I like running, and it makes me feel good, both mentally and physically. Even on the days, which are many, when going out for a run is the last thing I feel like doing, if I make the effort to get those running shoes laced up, and get myself out of the door, I am always glad that I did.
Saturday was a classic example. It was pretty cold here, with a fresh coat of snow only partially plowed off the roads - both good excuses for staying in by the fire. Not only that, but after a busy week, I had, metaphorically, run out of steam, and so even though I was up pretty early, I spent most of the morning mooching around in pajamas, getting some class-related reading done here and there, taking care of the boys, and circling back to bed every now and then. So when my dear husband got the little ones out of the house for a shopping expedition, it would have been all too easy to just hunker down in peace. But instead, I bundled up, set my iPhone to my favorite playlist, strapped on my Garmin Forerunner, and headed out into the tundra. And there it was... just half a mile down the road, I started to feel the bounce in my step and that feeling that it was good to be alive again.
I know this all sounds pretty alien to a lot of non-runners out there. I have had that conversation with my husband many times. He treadmill runs for fitness, and does not enjoy it at all, although he admits to feeling better afterwards. So he totally doesn't get how I can be such a freak about running, or why I would ever want to run, you know... just for fun. I am actually impressed with his dedication that he runs at all when it is as miserable as he describes it. It is much easier for me to be motivated, when I know that I will actually enjoy the experience. What he does takes much more effort.
So I was thinking about all of this as I headed down the road on Saturday. (Did I mention that I do my best thinking when I am out running as well?) I feel this incredible sense of freedom and power when my legs hit their groove, and I feel as if I can do anything, as if anything is possible. It is a pretty giddy feeling... or maybe it's just the endorphins kicking in. So that is when the wind sliced into the bare flesh on my face, and I thought of Kimmel's analogy. And I dug in, adjusted my stride and the angle of my body, and appreciated the fact that I could choose to run into the wind.
I am a runner not so much in the sense that I get out there regularly, although I try to. More importantly, I consider myself a runner because I like running, and it makes me feel good, both mentally and physically. Even on the days, which are many, when going out for a run is the last thing I feel like doing, if I make the effort to get those running shoes laced up, and get myself out of the door, I am always glad that I did.
Saturday was a classic example. It was pretty cold here, with a fresh coat of snow only partially plowed off the roads - both good excuses for staying in by the fire. Not only that, but after a busy week, I had, metaphorically, run out of steam, and so even though I was up pretty early, I spent most of the morning mooching around in pajamas, getting some class-related reading done here and there, taking care of the boys, and circling back to bed every now and then. So when my dear husband got the little ones out of the house for a shopping expedition, it would have been all too easy to just hunker down in peace. But instead, I bundled up, set my iPhone to my favorite playlist, strapped on my Garmin Forerunner, and headed out into the tundra. And there it was... just half a mile down the road, I started to feel the bounce in my step and that feeling that it was good to be alive again.
I know this all sounds pretty alien to a lot of non-runners out there. I have had that conversation with my husband many times. He treadmill runs for fitness, and does not enjoy it at all, although he admits to feeling better afterwards. So he totally doesn't get how I can be such a freak about running, or why I would ever want to run, you know... just for fun. I am actually impressed with his dedication that he runs at all when it is as miserable as he describes it. It is much easier for me to be motivated, when I know that I will actually enjoy the experience. What he does takes much more effort.
So I was thinking about all of this as I headed down the road on Saturday. (Did I mention that I do my best thinking when I am out running as well?) I feel this incredible sense of freedom and power when my legs hit their groove, and I feel as if I can do anything, as if anything is possible. It is a pretty giddy feeling... or maybe it's just the endorphins kicking in. So that is when the wind sliced into the bare flesh on my face, and I thought of Kimmel's analogy. And I dug in, adjusted my stride and the angle of my body, and appreciated the fact that I could choose to run into the wind.
Monday, January 17, 2011
My first blog - trying to get organized
So here it is - my first blog entry! It's strange, after years of writing for myself, and a small addiction to reading OTHER people's blogs, you'd have thought that I would have started my own blog a long time ago. But, it turns out, I am actually quite shy about sharing my thoughts about the world in a public forum, unless, of course, it is a status update on Facebook for select friends only. Even then, I am aware of editing myself quite a bit.
So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.
The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.
Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.
But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)
These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.
Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.
I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!
Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.
Bye for now!
So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.
The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.
Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.
But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)
These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.
Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.
I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!
Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.
Bye for now!
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