Why use QDA Miner qualitative data analysis software ?

More computer assistance on coding

QDA Miner offers more computer assistance for coding than any other qualitative research software on the market, allowing you to code documents more quickly but also more reliably. Other qualitative research tools typically offer a single text search tool to extract sentence or paragraphs containing specific words or phrases (what we call a Boolean search). QDA Miner offer not just one but seven text search and retrieval tools, allowing you to achieve more reliable coding in less time. Let’s look at some of these:

• The Keyword Retrieval tool can search in a single pass for hundreds of keywords and key phrases related to the same idea or concept, allowing you to locate all references to a single topic, no matter which words were used to express this idea.
• The Section Retrieval tool is ideal to automatically retrieve and tags sections in structured documents, allowing you, for example, to quickly attach codes, to turn in interview or focus group transcripts, or code a specific section in a collection of reports sharing the same structure.
• The Query by Example tool can be trained to retrieve text segments having similar meaning to the examples you feed in. It will expand and refine its search based on the relevance feedback you provide.
• The Cluster Extraction tool will group similar sentences or paragraphs into clusters and allow you to code these using a flexible drag-and-drop editor. It is very useful to quickly code large amounts of short text items such as open-ended responses, Twitter feeds and customer feedback. A real timesaver!
• The Code Similarity search will retrieve all text segments similar those that have already been coded, allowing you to identify sentences or phrases you may have missed. It may also be used to speed up the coding of partially coded projects. One may even search for items similar to codes defined in previous coded projects.
• The Date and Location extraction tool is ideal to quickly locate and tag references to events or to geographic locations. One may then attach specific codes, geotags or time tags to the retrieved items.

More computer assistance for analyzing

QDA Miner integrates statistical and visualization tools such as clustering, multidimensional scaling, heatmaps, correspondence analysis and sequence analysis. It can also compute statistical tests such as Chi Square, Pearson Correlation and so on, to help you identify the strongest relationships. No need to purchase separate statistical software or transfer data to another application. You can quickly identify patterns and trends, explore patterns in your coding, as well as describe, compare and test hypotheses without the need to even leave the software. This is one of the reasons why QDA Miner is considered by many to be the first and still only true, mixed methods qualitative software on the market today.

More assistance in report writing

QDA Miner offers more assistance for reporting than any other QDA software. You can easily create, within QDA Miner, presentation-quality graphics such as bar charts, pie charts, bubble charts and concept maps, and export them as required to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML and other popular formats. Also, its unique Report Manager tool allows you easy, single-location storing of queries and analysis results; tables and graphs; as well as research notes and quotes. It also helps you organize information, structure findings, and draft interpretations, or to assemble any other relevant pieces of information that you may wish to include in your final report. Once you are ready, the structured information may be exported to Microsoft Word, RTF or HTML for final editing.

More assistance for teamwork

Large qualitative research projects often require the effort of multiple coders. QDA Miner offers assistance in such situation by providing enhanced teamwork support features like a flexible multi-user settings tool that allows you to define for each team worker what they can or cannot do. QDA Miner will assist you in duplication and distribution of projects to team members. It also provide a powerful merge feature bringing together, in any single project, codings, annotations, reports, and log entries of different coders working independently. It also offers a unique inter-raters agreement assessment module, that may be use to ensure the coding reliability of multiple coders.

More computer assistance for larger projects

A single QDA Miner project can hold tens of thousands of documents, or hundreds of thousands of short text responses. Even with such large projects, the software will use a limited amount of computer resources (memory & CPU time). Our development team has spent a great deal of time optimizing the software for speed, so even when performing complex searches, advanced statistical analysis, or when creating large reports, QDA Miner will responds quickly.