Ann,
this becomes interesting. Thanks for your thoughful comments, here is my reply:
At 18:33 10/06/2004, you wrote:
>BUT.... theres a lot more to much CAQDAS software , than just coding (as you
>say in several places), but I mean a LOT. ...and anyway in defence of
>codes - they are, as Seidel and Kelle suggested (1995) 'just heuristic
>devices for discovery' ...I love that description, and it holds a lot more
>possiblities than are catered for in your statement
>"Coding in my view has a strong elective affinity to counting. By coding you
>standardize your data to a certain extent, which is not a bad thing, but
>something that can easily be used for quantitative analysis"
>...well I know I took that out of context slightly Thomas...but to many of
>us its 'damning with very faint praise'
Well, actually, I'm quite happy with the quote, even out of context,
because I personally don't find anything inherently wrong with counting. In
fact, I really like counting and stats, and this is where I see loads of
opportunities for CAQDAS, which have yet to be explored. I sometimes have
the feeling that among some so-called (so-called, because I really see no
point in the qualitative/quantitative distinction) "qualitative"
researchers, there is some underlying assumption that quantitative research
is theoretically unchallenging, even by definition positivistic. It is not.
There is good and bad in both qualitative and quantitative work, so it is
not a disgrace, if you compute some frequencies, or do some more
sophisticated quantitative analysis, if theory and data allow for such
analysis.
There also is absolutely nothing wrong with "standardization." Yes, social
life is complex and cannot be neatly fitted into standardized categories,
but after all *any* social theory must to some extent standardize,
otherwise it's not a theory, but simply a description of reality. So, even
if we cannot *neatly* fit social life into categories, we still have to fit
it, in a way that does both justice to complexities in real life and the
need for parsimony in theory.
OK, after this little defense of counting and coding, I would also like to
make the point that coding is not always the way forward.
To give you a simple example from my own work: I am currently looking, how
newspapers in different countries framed the "Berlusconi-Schulz" incident
(inter alia using CAQDAS (MAXqda) for coding btw). Last July, Italy's prime
minister Berlusconi called the German Social Democratic MEP Martin Schulz a
"kapo", an auxilliary concentration camp guard. Papers framed that incident
in all sorts of ways, but - from my preliminary skimming -- there appear to
exist a number of things they do *not* say. For instance,
- The papers do not mention that the *main* insult of Berlusconi was
(probably inadvertendly) against the victims of the holocaust, *because*,
however nasty Schulz may be, he certainly did not instill the same fear in
his adversaries as did guards in the concentration camp inmates. A few
papers say *that* Berlusconi made an insult to holocaust victims, but they
fail to elaboate, why that is the case.
- They also do not elaborate on the fact that /kapos/ were prisoners
themselves and not even necessarily ethnic Germans.
How would I code something that is precisely *not* to be found in the data
(or so I hope, because, otherwise I will heve to adjust my theory)? For
sure, it would make no sense to code each and every story with "concept of
kapo has not been elaboated." In fact, why should I even make such a code,
after all, there are hundreds of other things that go unreported, so why
would I expect that the papers should explain, what a kapo is?
Of course, this is a pretty straightford case, where coding does not help
me at all, but theory does. For my purposes, this is a mere aside, most of
the remainder of my work is done with coding -- and counting. But a more
sophisticated theoretical analysis, might not require any coding at all.
Kracauer (1952) makes this point more eloquently than I can do.
> >.Which *other* than methodological (and therfore implicitly theoretical)
>aspects would you suggest in the choice, if and what CAQDAS to use? I can
>only think of financial aspects here, but I don't think that's what you had
>in mind.
[...]
>And there are *other*
>considerations' Thomas - often researchers don't have a specific
>methodology - yes really!
That's what I fear. Call me old-fashioned (or maybe anti-post-Feyerabend?),
but I still think that methodology is the most important thing for
empirical studies, well after theory, that is.
>They only want a data management tool.
If you really "only" want a data management tool, I still hope you already
have an idea *how* to manage your data. Sometimes, for ordering data, it
might be much easier to use a non-CAQDAS management tool. Even the Windows
Explorer might do, or more sophisticated replacement like Cardfile. Or a
spreadsheet program. Or a database program. It all despends on your type of
data and your approach. For much of International Comparative work, I would
avoid CAQDAS, because even with recent advances, they don't swallow as many
file formats as does Windows Explorer or Cardfile, and for most purposes, a
spreadsheet would do the job much more efficiently than any CAQDAS. If I
want to compare, say media systems across countries, I might get
information from all sorts of different sources and would store these
information in a database. That is much more efficient than using even the
most versatile CAQDAS. I can even take the relevant information, say,
number of local/national papers, readership figures, degree of state
involvement in the media, etc., from hardcopies and type them into my
database. For further analysis, fs/QCA would beat any CAQDAS hands down.
Ann, your post was quite thought provoking, and so I came up with yet
another problem (not a shortcoming, but a problem) of methodological
guidance through CAQDAS: They tend to guide you towards positivist
theorizing, and by positivist I mean positivist in the original sense, that
is inductive theorizing a la Vienna Circle (Carnap et al.). Just look at
the "in vivo" coding function most CAQDAS offer: If that's not an ingenious
way of inductionism, what is? Of course, sometimes /in vivo/ coding is a
useful thing, but you might get addicted to it, if you are not careful.
It's easy to start out with /in vivo/ coding and then gradually work
yourself up to higher, more general codes, espicially, if you do not have a
clear-cut theory, before you examine your data. In the end, you might end
up with some thoroughly positivistic theory and one that is not even
necessarily supported by the power of numbers. All you end up with is a
summary of reality. A neat one, to be sure, but not really a theory, even
less a critical theory and even less Critical Theory.
Several social theorists have emphasized that positivistic theorizing is
not only inherently conservative, but when it comes to discourse data, it
also precludes effective analysis, which requires you to distance divorce
your theoretical concepts from everyday life concepts (Bourdieu called that
"breaking with social categories").
I am aware that there are scholars, who think differently. Particularly,
when I look at some of the stuff that is written in the Denzin/Lincoln
reader for Qualiative Research, I see people, who seem to advocate a
theorizing that more or less "arises" from the data (I am definitely
oversimplifying here and will expand on that strawman in the future). But
that's precisely my point: They would not feel "guilty", when coding /in
vivo/, but given my different theoretical outlook, I do (still, I press
that button time and again just for convenience).
Again, nobody is forced to code /in vivo/, but chances are, if the concept
is available, you might use it, even if you don't have any theoretical
justification for it. Just like it is standard practice to compute
correlation matrices in SPSS, despite the fact that is hugely problematic, too.
Thomas
__________________________
Kracauer, Siegfried (1952): "The challenge of qualitative content
analysis," Public Opinion Quarterly 16: 631-642.
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