Dear Davina, I am working on my PhD, which is a longitudinal study
looking at support over time to the families of children in permanent
care, who have been removed by the protective system - I have been
talking with the birth families, permanent families, social workers,
therapists, teachers etc every 3-6 months over a 3 year period. This
sounds somewhat similar to your project. I did a lot of research on qual.
software and eventually decided on Atlas-ti, because of its user
friendliness plus its ability to map the data. Although I'm not up to the
stage of mapping the data yet and so can't comment on how useful it is in
practice, I certainly expect that it will be. The coding, which I'm
still working on, is wonderfully easy to learn and use.
I shall also be using Atlas for another project, working in a team - this
involves analysing the qual. data arising from the Asthma Linking
Project, which involves longitudinal evaluation of education/support
given to NESB families whose children have asthma.
Hope this is helpful
Cas O'Neill
University of Melbourne, Australia
DAVINA A ALLEN wrote:
>
> >I am currently exploring the various CAQDAS in order to support a
> >qualitative study of the roles and responsiblities at the health and
> >social care interface. The study will be based on 8 case studies. A
> >case comprises a client and their surrounding web of carers - informal -
> >formal.- The research is being carried out in two different academic
> >institutions. I am currently looking into software in order to
> >support the project.
> >
> >My own experience has been with FolioViews (in the context of two
> >ethnographic studies) - and I have been very impressed with both the
> >ease of coding and the speed of its searches. However I have only
> >ever used this program on single researcher projects - where pen and
> >paper diagrams sufficed in the analysis stage - and so it's lack of
> >'theory-building' capabilities was never an issue. Given that this new
> >project would involve a number of researchers involved in the analysis
> >I thought it would be useful to look at packages where 'current
> >thinking' could be represented in visual form. I've spent some time
> >looking at the demos - Altasti, HyperResearcher, Ethnograph, Decision
> >Explorer - but I have to say that past experience has made me deeply
> >suspicious of demos.
> >
> >I just wondered if you could advise me as to whether any of these
> >alternatives would be most able to support the kind of work we have
> >in mind and be a better option than FolioViews.
> >
> >One option I did consider was to look at Decision Explorer to support
> >the analysis and thinking but use FolioViews for search and
> >retreival. Both packages seem to do both well - but to use two rather than one
> >seems a bit cumbersome somehow.
> >
> >I'm interested to note how little FolioViews figures in discussion
> >of softward packages. ( Which is one of the reasons why I'm thinking
> about alternatives.) Is there any reason for this? To me it has
> >much to commend it - not least it user-friendliness!
> >
> >As you can see I am in a quandry. I would greatly appreciate any
> advice.
> >
> >
> >Davina Allen
> >Nursing Research Centre
> >School of Nursing Studies
> >UWCM
> >Heath Park
> >Cardiff
> >CF4 4XN
> >
> >Email:[log in to unmask]
> >
> >tel: 0122-743837
> >
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