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I am currently about to hurl because NVivo, one of the premiere qualitative analysis packages on the market, is so cumbersome and ugly. Granted, it's designed for the PC and I have to run it on Windows (that's explains part of the pain) - but is this really the best there is? A program that costs $595 for a full license and $240 for the (one-year!) student license, but can't scroll text fluidly or automatically update drop-down boxes? The only Mac competitor seems to be the free TAMS Analyzer, which I like, but it's not nearly as powerful and the awkward interface keeps it from being consumer friendly.

There are thousands of academics and evaluators in education, government, and the non-profit sector that would rejoice if someone offered a well-designed, robust qualitative analysis application that was made for the Mac and worked as smoothly as OF or OOP. In other words, if Omni built software like this I think there would be flocks of happy customers.

Thanks,

Jim
 
JMP?

commonly called 'jump'

not as easy as Minitab but it has a mac version
 
I was requesting qualitative analysis software. JMP is for quantitative analysis.

For what it's worth, I've moved on to ATLAS.ti and I'm happier, but it's still not a native Mac application.
 
Can I bump this? I've recently been looking for qualitative analysis software, and there is STILL nothing really going for mac.

In fact, I'm not looking for qualitative analysis software with the bloated feature set of the current windows offerings. I'm looking for something which I think would have very broad appeal to anyone who works with text documents in an analytical fashion

If you've never used this software, it's hard to understand quite how good it can be. In essence, it's like the colour coded tabs you used to markup your textbooks with at college, but it allows you to get presented with an auto generated page with just those sections colour coded.

Say you've got an academic article, or a another long word document, and you have a number of themes running through it, or perhaps just places which require clarification. So you have tags - a 'clarification' tag, or a 'weak argument tag', etc. And you go through applying your tags to the text (called 'Coding' in Qualitative jargon). Then at the end you can select any one of those tags (or more), and - just like in our favorite GTD apps - only the highlighted portions of text get displayed to you. It's so powerful. I use a 'quotation' tag all the time to mark up things I think might be useful quotations. I then get an auto-generated list of them, with the ability to jump straight back to the quote in its original content.

The intuitive appeal is obvious - people love tagging for filesystems, GTD systems etc. We do 'coding' in between files. Why not inside. Most people don't want the bloated statistical analysis work or coding hierarchy stuff the £££ windows software comes with. Please Omni - a simple, beautiful, intuitive coding programme. Please?
 
In an attempt to bump this thread, I'd also like to say that I'd love to see a Mac-native alternative to TAMS Analyzer. I'm currently looking for a CAQDAS package, and have been looking at the available alternatives. Most of the Windows applications are hideously expensive. NVivo and Atlas.ti are the two that everybody talks about, and MAXQDA and QDA Miner are two that have recently been gaining plaudits. The impression I get is that usability expectations in specialist fields of Windows software are pretty low, and this is one field that's ripe for a shake-up.

Thanks for starting this thread, Jim. Please let us know how your work with Atlas.ti goes. I'd also love to hear about anyone else's experience with this kind of software.

By the way, there's a nice but incomplete series of tutorials on MAXQDA at http://www.gravlee.org/teaching/tutorials-qualitative/
 
Let me bump this suggestion to!! Especially MCC's thoughts! Looking for some basic CAQDAS software that doesn't insult my sense of user-functionality. Nvivo looks ok, but alas its PC only and I'd need a small mortgage!

I have been experimenting with Omnioutliner for basic text coding and searching, by having one column for text and another for codes, enabling rows to be labelled with a Codes which are then searchable. It helps but isn't really enough!

This could be vastly improved by some manageable changes to omnioutliner:
1. including filtering in omnioutliner (which I believe has been suggested a long time ago) so that all rows with other codes were filtered out (like MCC suggests).
2. Implement a tagging system.
3. Saveable searches / smart folders to keep hold of different codes.

memos and interview sections could then be tagged and quickly recalled. Like mcc, I'm not looking for complex CAQDAS, I just need to be able to analyse text to know what I've got!
 
New to the conversation literally and figuratively. Check out a web-app called Dedoose at: http://www.dedoose.com

Full disclosure, I am part of the team that designed and is developing this tool. As a research psychologist at UCLA who works with scientists in other disciplines, we needed something to manage and analyze the data from our growing number of qualitative and mixed methods projects. Didn't need all the bells and whistles in programs like NUDIST (dating myself?), MaxQDA, or Atlas.ti. We needed it to be simple, inexpensive, and intuitive, for multiple platforms and geographically distributed teams, and needed it to easily integrate the qualitative and quantitative data we were working with. So, we built a tool called EthnoNotes for ourselves and then the many users who heard and followed.

Technologies have changed (a lot) since EthnoNotes was first designed and we found that lots of people liked what EthnoNotes offered, so we got it together about 2 years ago and started building Dedoose.

Dedoose is in final beta-testing and many of our EthnoNotes users have already migrated over. It blows EthnoNotes away and, from what I'm reading in this forum, is designed to solve most of what people are asking for.
 
Just to add a few technical notes to Eli's post. Dedoose should work on the mac pretty well, especially if you ensure you have the newest flash player - http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ that adobe just released that adds GPU acceleration for flash. Dedoose is web based, very easy to use and intuitive. Especially in comparison to the other QDA software on the market. It is a web based application and can be accessed from just about any computer connected to the internet. It uses multiple layers of encryption and security management as well as allowing for your own data storage if your paranoid about that. We just released version 1.0, and should have 1.1 out pretty soon which adds support for memo's / bookmarks and the training center or inter-rater reliability training, as well as a free version for testing that will allow a limited number of documents and such. All upgrades are free and seamless as there is no software to install. We will have a roadmap up on our site to show our detailed plans to include video & audio support along with powerful collaboration features.
~ JT
 
Just an update, Dedoose has since launched and added many features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Quote:
Hey all, Dedoose is out the door and we’ve uploaded what we feel is a terrific video where I give a brief orientation to qualitative research methods and then their place in mixed methods research (and how Dedoose facilitates the work). I talk a bit about how Dedoose was inspired by our research teams’ experience with qualitative and mixed method research and the evolution of technologies to support the work. We’re hoping to expose users to how Dedoose is able to radically redefine the workflow and efficacy of researchers and research teams in all social science disciplines; and at a fraction of the cost of traditional software.


The video is based on data we collected for a market research project looking at people’s perceptions regarding a new hotel concept in Las Vegas. One of the things we plan to do is continue producing small video presentations to help educate researchers about how to carry-out rigorous, reliable, and valid mixed methods research, so we’d love to receive feedback on the content we provided and what people feel would be other major needs to address in our fields of work. Here’s the URL for the video in case I didn’t get it right above:http://www.dedoose.com/LearnMore/Vid...?autoplay=true

So, and perhaps it goes without saying, Dedoose is formally launched, having left the beta period about two weeks ago. We are thrilled with the feature set and were able to vastly improve users’ experience with the terrific feedback we received from the beta team and (very) early adopters. Lot’s of improvements came on line during just the past few weeks, including an awesome nested chart that exposes patterns in the qualitative data and coding activity broken out by two descriptor variables. For example, show me how males vs females within rural versus urban settings vary on what and how they speak about and weighting on their relative importance of air quality? Or in some analysis we began today, how do adolescents and their parents speak about youth obligations broken out by family income level and the objective number of chores the youth actually do in a typical week? …these are truly the kinds of questions only mixed methods research can begin to address.

Finally, knowing that the rest of the research world is still working to understand what we are all doing as we build the field of mixed methods research, we’ve instituted a generous referral program. You don’t have to be a Dedoose user to refer someone else, but you’d still receive the reward so we hope you’ll consider reaching out to others in your networks who might be interested.

Cheers for now,

Eli
 
Hi everyone, it's been awhile since we last updated this entry, and it seems a lot of users find Dedoose through this thread. Here are some of the major changes Dedoose has seen (current version is 2.1).
  • Memo System - Ability to create ad-hoc notes and link them to excerpts, codes, descriptors, documents, etc. Full exportability
  • Training Center - Inter-rater relability testing for single or groups of users using both code appliaction and code weighting. We are using Cohen's Kappa, and Pearson's Correlation Co-efficent. This helps both a single user or a tea of users ensure the integretity of their analysis.
  • Chat System - Dedoose now includes a native chat system to communicate in real time to everyone in your project.
  • Code Import, Export, and Merge
  • Full Doc support in addition to other formats
  • Massive speed improvements. We are seeing project load times hve droped by over 20x in the last few months, along with massive in project speed enhancements.
  • Dedoose Forum - a web forum for keeping in touch with Dedoose, learning more, getting support, or communicating to other Dedoose users.
  • Advanced Project Importer - ability to import a excel doc with quantitative and qualitative data (for example from a survey monkey study) as a new project in Dedoose. The importer automatically creates the documents, excerpts, tags, descriptor fields, descriptors, and descriptor<->document links, essentially completing the entire index phase for you automatically.
  • Payment system updates - we have simplified the pricing model, added discounts, and the ability to pay-as-you-go.

Ther is a lot more going on at Dedoose, with massive improvements happening at a break-neck speed. Check out the forum or our blog to stay in touch. Give us a call, shoot us an email, or post a message on the forum if you have any questions. Also, we are more than willing to beat any competitors price anywhere under any circumstances.
Happy Coding!
~ JT
 
 


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