Anne,
Anne Kuckartz wrote:
>first of all let me state, that this is absolutely NOT the size of a
>"normal" qualitative research data set!
>
Sorry, I have to take issue with this statement. I think that it might
be misleading to talk of "normality" in this respect. Qualitative
analysis is IMO *not* defined by quantity, but by the mode of analysis
(even that is debatable in my view, but for the sake of the argument I
will stick with this definition). True, maybe a "typical" project that
uses CAQDAS has "only" 100 interview transcripts, but that doesn't mean
that you cannot have real bulky data and still conduct, among others
possibly, a discourse analysis of segments of the data. As you yourself
say:
>[...] also due to the major changes in the
>structure of inter personal communication, the fields and also the data
>structure of qualitative topics is rapidly changing.
>
>
CMC has enabled us to gather huge amounts of data, and we should not let
these new opportunities be foreclosed by a conceptualization of
qualitative as meaning "small numbers."
>You will certainly not find a package which is designed to handle these data
>amounts for a QDA.
>
>
8,000 records don't sound that many too me. You won't be able to analyze
all these data in detail, but I don't see, why MAXqda or QDAMiner could
not handle this amount of data. For our paper on the
"Berlusconi-Schulz" debate
(http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/research/case_studies/berlusconi/index.html)
we had 10,176 records, and on a fairly old Pentium III 450MHz (1/2GB
RAM) computer, there was no problem with MAXqda. For another paper where
we use a similar methodology on the Turkey Accession debates, QDAMiner
also didn't make any problems. Qualrus is a bit slower than these two,
but still might be worth looking at. Maybe NVivo 7 will soon be another
candidate and I cannot say anything about HyperRESEARCH and bulk data.
Having said that, I thought that Paula simply wants to do is some
thematic categorization of the data, not a qualitative analysis of any
sorts. You can do that in both MAXqda or QDAMiner quite well, but I
wonder why not simply do it in Access?
The again, I like keyword approaches for autocoding. For that the two
said programs are suitable.
Thomas
--
thomas koenig, ph.d.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/
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