> Essentially is it worthwhile to expend that time and
> effort in learning new software functions (and money
> on its purchase)? And is a manual approach (however
> modified) grossly antiquated in the 21st century!
I would say - yes, in any case. I have sometimes been tempted to NOT go
through the effort of coding the data up in an CAQDAS package, if it was
just a small data set (oh yeah, this I can easily handle without software).
Then I only found myself anoid, if I could not find text segments (or only
after a lenghty search through the pages of text and my coding) that I knew
that they were there somewhere. You need to spend the time coding anyway (an
in your case another week or so on top to learn the software) - but software
makes it so much easier later to retrieve that data. And that starts already
when you just have simple queries. Asking more complex questions (in your
case testing your hypothesis or research questions) is sometimes very
difficult to achieve using the old 'by hand' method. Software will
facilitate that by a great deal.
I would also think that it is quite antiquated to use a manual approach in
the 21st century (as you posed this question) - but then again, I am one of
those persons that likes to play with new technologies....
Susanne
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