Hello, Yan, and I hope the other members of the list find this useful too.
If not, then I apologize.

It sounds like the issue is how you and other members of the team can use
your document sharing platform to assure that any changes made using the
qualitative analysis program by one person are incorporated into the revised
files used by other team members.  We use a facility like that to share
sourcecode for the Qualrus program among our programmers, and it is a common
strategy in the programming industry.

Qualrus, and probably Ethnograph and other qualitative programs, generally
use proprietary files to save the code structure, code assignments, links
among codes, and in general all of the information the program adds to the
source files.  Qualrus keeps these separate from the original text or rtf
files.  Some programs may mark up the source files, incorporating the new
information into them and saving them in a proprietary format.  Either way,
you want to make sure everyone is on the same page and has all of the
changes.

The Qualrus files that are created in this manner have an .iq* suffix (there
are several of them).  However, those are standard ascii text files and can
be read with many of the document version control programs.  So you should
be able to use these with your document sharing platform.

Alternatively, Qualrus has a built-in feature that has essentially the same
functionality.  This import feature merges information from separate
versions of the same project.  It allows any of the team members to open
their current project (with whatever changes they have made since the last
time they coodinated with other team members) and then import different
versions of that same project from other team members.  The program
highlights differences between the versions and they can elect to import the
different components or keep the current ones.  This merge/import facility
is part of the Qualrus program and does not require the purchase of a
separate component as is required for some qualitative analysis packages.
This gives Qualrus true team research capabilities.

But if I might say so, the really difficult part of conducting team research
is not just keeping the files consistent, but keeping the researchers
consistent.  Since you have a geographically dispersed team you may also be
interested in Qualrus' ability to help assure consistency of coding.
Because Qualrus uses intelligent strategies to suggest codes to the user
based on patterns in the data and learns when the user accepts or rejects
those recommendations, this provides a built-in quality control feature as
the program becomes trained in the coding task and helps promote a
consistent coding standard for the entire research team.  This same feature
tracks consistency of each coder with the coding recommendations to help
identify quality concerns and provide an opportunity to address them early
in the coding.

I hope I have understood your question this time and that this information
helps. If not, feel free to contact me directly and I can stop boring other
members of this listserve.

Ed

Edward Brent, Ph.D.
President, Idea Works, Inc.
100 West Briarwood
Columbia, Missouri   65203   USA
(573) 445-4554
(573) 446-2199 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
www.ideaworks.com
www.qualrus.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Yan Gong" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: Question over file format


> Hello, Ed
>
> Thanks very much for the quick response. But my concern is the format of
> output file by the software package, instead of the input file, which can
> be .txt or .doc for Ethnograph. Could you please give me some clues over
> the standard output file format of Qualrus? Thanks
>
> Have a good day
>
> Yan
>
> At 06:01 PM 10/23/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Yan,
> >
> >Qualrus works with standard .txt or rtf (rich text format) files in text
as
> >well as a wide range of standard audio, video, and graphic formats.  For
> >more information, you can see details at www.qualrus.com.
> >
> >Ed
> >
> >Edward Brent, Ph.D.
> >President, Idea Works, Inc.
> >100 West Briarwood
> >Columbia, Missouri   65203   USA
> >(573) 445-4554
> >(573) 446-2199 (fax)
> >[log in to unmask]
> >www.ideaworks.com
> >
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Yan Gong" <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: <[log in to unmask]>
> >Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 5:44 PM
> >Subject: Question over file format
> >
> >
> > > Dear all:
> > >
> > > I have a question concerning the file format of qualitative analysis
> >package.
> > >
> > > Currently I ordered the Ethnograph v5.0 for the project, but it turned
out
> > > that the file format of Ethnograph is .eth, which is not compatible
with
> > > .doc or .txt file. Since our team members scatters across different
> > > geographic locations, we are working together on some document sharing
> > > platform, which, unfortunately, only supports the common generic file
> > > formats like .doc, .txt, .xls, etc.
> > >
> > > So do you know any text analysis package whose file format is
compatible
> > > the generic formats? Thanks for any information!
> > >
> > > Yan
> > >
>