I still haven’t done a lot with my data – I went overseas after writing this post, and have spent most of the time since I got back adding to the pile of interviews instead. Have you tried it out? Any experiences to report, or things I should look out for? If it works well, I’ll look into using it for collaborative projects later on. There’s a 30-day free trial available, and I’ll see how I go from there. I think that a PhD project is a good place to start trialling it, as I don’t need to convince a group of co-workers to give it a shot.
However, there seems to be a lot of online support, so I can teach myself how to use it. There’s a very established NVivo community here, and a lot of organisational resistance to change. It has two black marks against it in an RMIT context: it’s new, and it’s not NVivo.
Cross-platform (so I can use it on my Mac without needing to buy and install Windows and Parallels or VMware Fusion! That already saves me a few hundred dollars).
It’s also browser-based, so can be used from almost any computer with an internet connection. I like things that are built with a researcher’s workflow in mind, instead of a list of features that you need to work around. Like the other tools that I’ve come to rely upon ( Zotero for managing references, Scrivener for writing) it’s not an incremental upgrade that adds bells and whistles to an existing product. I recently discovered a tool called Dedoose.
However, the Qualitative Data Analysis Software for Mac – A Brief Look post that I wrote last September is still getting a huge amount of traffic every day, and I thought it was time to write a quick update. Technically I’m not meant to be looking at data analysis right now: it’s writing month, and the last thing I need to be doing is getting lost in data.