I am a doctoral student and will be carrying out qualitative research in
Russia later this year. Participants will be asked to write detailed
accounts of specific incidents relating to the topic I am researching.
There will be about 150-200 individual accounts, each will consist of just
under 3 (A4) pages of handwritten Russian text. The main analysis I will
need to do on these texts is content analysis to identify appropriate
categories into which all of the incidents reported can be allocated. I will
also want to be able to count the number of occurrences and other similar
fairly simple numerical tasks.
I am keen to use software for the analysis - I am reasonably computer
literate but not brilliant. I have tried out the tutorial on the demo
version of N4. It seemed OK but I have read elsewhere that others (N5,
NVivo, Atlas.ti) may be better and/or easier to learn and use.
But one of my main questions is obviously, which of these, if any, could I
use to perform analysis on Russian language texts as I do not want to
translate participants' replies before analysing them as that seems
methodologically very unsound and, anyway, my Russian is OK for doing
analysis on written texts.
If any or all of these software programs can read Cyrillic, perhaps those in
the know could also advise me how to input the data. I was planning to have
the handwritten texts typed into Word in Russian and I could then format as
required by the software. But perhaps it is also possible to scan from
Russian handwriting? That would save some time and cost if it's possible.
I'd appreciate any advice other list members have of doing computer assisted
analysis on Russian language data.
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