We offer a short qual software (atlas.ti) undergrad course before out
qual methods courses (partly for external, curricular reasons, partly
in order to be able to be able to use the program in the methods
classes). For many students it means learning just a bag of tricks
applied to some irrelevant data, not leaning tools for thinking and
theorizing. The same seems to be the problem with all the software
tutorials. The tutorials may work well for more advanced students as
they can already relate the tricks to problems of analysis they have
encountered.
One solution would be to find so interesting data that the students
would just get carried away with it. That we have tried to do, but
students' interests vary (the course is for students of all
disciplines in Social Sciences).
Now I'm trying to find some quite low-level practical examples and
tutorials of what researches do with their data when they have
problems to solve. How the coding schemes evolve, how concept-maps,
searches, crosstabulations etc have helped in improving the coding
scheme, theorizing and writing up? Not just what to click to get some
"results".
http://www.idrc.ca/cp/ev-106563-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html seems to be a
good one. Any others? Nothing in http://ocw.mit.edu/ ?
-Timo Harmo
Computing Coordinator, Fac of Soc Sci, U of Helsinki.
P.S. one special topic that I'd like to learn more about myself, and
to be able to offer to students is using qual software as a writing
tool. For example, in Atlas.ti memos from the first draft can be
turned into primary documents from which the second draft can be
extracted, and the network views can serve as basis for the final
outline. This would be especially useful for some of our students who
are not interested in qualitative methods at all but unfortunately do
take the course.
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