Apologies for Cross-posting
Please circulate to colleagues
Qualitative Innovations in CAQDAS (QUIC) and the CAQDAS Networking Project are hosting a FREE seminar about an exciting new tool for qualitative researchers : Veyor®. Edward Brent and Curtis Atkisson from Idea Works will be leading the seminar on 31st March 2011.
Full details appended below.
Places are free but must be booked. To book a place please visit the url below and fill in a bookng form.
http://caqdas.soc.surrey.ac.uk/Training/calendar.html
===========================================================================================
Thursday 31st March 2011, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Developers Seminar: Abstract
Veyor®: A Standards-Based Automated Coding Program for Unstructured Text
Edward Brent and Curtis Atkisson, Idea Works, Inc.
A small selection of information on the program may be found at http://www.ideaworks.com/solutions/index.html
Qualitative analysis has always been a time-consuming process. Yet, qualitative researchers – even those
embracing CAQDAS – have resisted totally automating qualitative analysis out of concerns for the validity of the
results. This approach has distinguished CAQDAS from more extensively automated methods such as content
analysis and text mining. Veyor seeks to borrow the best aspects of qualitative data analysis, content analysis, and
text mining, while minimizing their weaknesses. Veyor® is a standards-based automated coding program for
unstructured text. Veyor seeks to improve on CAQDAS by automating coding, but does so in a way that places
high validity standards in the forefront, instituting a statistical quality control regimen that permits the human
coder to train the program until it reaches the standard for performance and only then coding the rest of the data
automatically. Veyor raises the bar for validity and reliability higher than the norm for CAQDAS offering the
promise of improved quality of coding in projects that could be coded using traditional qualitative approaches.
Equally important, this approach makes it possible to extend qualitative analysis to very large data sets and to
ongoing data streams for which other CAQDAS strategies would be too expensive, too slow, or too unreliable.
The presentation will discuss these issues, will compare and contrast this approach with content analysis and data
mining, and will identify kinds of data and research problems for which Veyor is or is not appropriate. Key
elements of the process will be demonstrated with two example research applications: The first study examined
political discourse on the Internet to predict election results in the 2010 US Congressional elections, and illustrates
the continuous automated monitoring of an ongoing stream of data on the Internet. The second study analyzed
student responses to an open-ended survey question of why they might cheat, and illustrates how Veyor can be
trained and validated for one study and then applied to subsequent studies at reduced cost and increased speed
while assuring a higher standard of consistency across studies than permitted by traditional methods.
Dr Christina Silver
Qualitative Innovations in CAQDAS (QUIC)
The CAQDAS Networking Project, Manager
|