This is an issue qualidata has been addressing ovr the past couple of years.
I gave a seminar on this at the CAQDAS group at Surrey in June of this year
and a set of guidliens relating to archiving are in draft at the moment.
In terms of retaining qualitaive materials for future re-use, we have
guidelines on the form and content of what materials over and above the raw
text might be useful.
Raw data and accompanying textual documentation should be reduced to its
simplest form, i.e. ASCII text, without line breaks. These should be
anoymised where appropriate; contain Interviewer and Respondent markers; be
single spaced with a single line between paragraphs; be on High Density
Diskette which is DOS compatible; and be 'external' files, rather than
programme-specific or 'internal' files. With regard to images, Tiff4
format is still the current standard.
A key to detailed jargon is also very helpful and we think that it would be
particularly useful to have a 'running' reflective and technical memo.
Where teams are working on a project this kind of memoing if often carried
out quite routinely but it does raises the problem of what and how much to
keep. Since we would not wish to archive every memo, an edited version
would be preferable. This would mean effort would have to put into editing
such memos to produce something suitable and useful for archiving.
Files should have common attributes such that this meta data would enable
future researchers to make sense of a project's machine-readable files, once
the depositor is no longer around. For example each file needs to be
meaningfully named and there need to be a uers guide to the content of the
files. a guide to hthe files. We also require a basic interview summary
sheet containing biographical information, e.g. Gender, Age, date of
interview, region. employment status and any other significant variables,
which should alos be in ASCII format (or rtf). Qualidata have pro-formas for
these.
The major problem we see with CAQDAS produced data and output is what to do
with the set of fully coded data and other files in programme-specific
format. How useful is it to preserve internal files? How can we generate
useful coherent documents from hypertext which have a complex structure and
pathways of linked memos and codes to text. Are outputs of search and
retrieve operations useful? Since some of the CAQADS programmes around
today may be obsolete in a couple of years time, archiving of the raw data
and other files in programme-specific format may not be useful.
I know that have been moves to work towards a common exportable format from
many of the major softwares, and this would be very useful for archival
purposes. One would expect lists of retrievals not to be generally useful
for future researchers except in the case of large transcripts, such as oral
histroy interviews when navigating your way around such a huge bulk of
material might be extremely time consuming.
We would welcome comments on of these points before we finalise and
circulate our own guidelines.
Louise Corti
Manager, Qualidata
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
UK
+ 44 1206 873058
email: [log in to unmask]
url: <www/essex.ac.uk/qualidata/>
-----Original Message-----
From: Anna Triandafyllidou [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 09, 1998 11:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CAQDAS and secondary analysis of qual.data
I just finished reading Barry's article on Soc.Res.Online and also some
shorter articles suggested previously in the list, namely Walsh and Lavalli
Microtimes, TaggOram articles and have been also visiting Social Research
Update at Surrey University website.
I think Barry's analysis is as much distanced from her own preferences as
one could expect and very informative. I find Walsh and Lavalli's article
very informative and concise too. The same goes for the brief but
informative and concise contributions appearing in SRU. Congrats and thanks
to all contributors/authors!
I would like to invite fellow list discussants to reflect on the
relationship between the use of such software and what is called secondary
analysis of qualitative data. Maybe the need/possibility of storing and
organising data in a way that they can be used later for secondary analysis
offers a new dimension for evaluating the software and a new concern for
software developpers?!
Best,
Anna Triandafyllidou
---------------------------------------------------
| Dr. Anna Triandafyllidou
|
| Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow
|
| Institute of Psychology
|
| Italian National Research Council (CNR)|
| viale Marx 15, Rome 00137, Italy
|
| tel. +39 06 86090220
|
| fax +39 06 824737
|
| email: [log in to unmask]
|
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