What the heck is CAQDAS? And why do I need to know about it?

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.