Balancing the insights of human interpretation with the power of qualitative software: analysing COVID-19 habits using WordStat and QDA Miner

In this “lunch and learn” we discuss the development and implementation of an analysis of international survey data into changing habits during the COVID-19 pandemic using WordStat and QDA Miner. We begin by discussing the context of the research, including the nature and scope of the data, the theoretical context, overarching objectives and research questions, and outcome requirements. We then describe the iterative development of the analysis plan and how we sought to ensure an appropriate balance between the interpretive value of human researchers and harnessing the power of software tools to facilitate efficient and valid analysis. We discuss selected analytic tasks, illustrating how they were undertaken using WordStat and QDA Miner tools, and discussing the usefulness of the tools for different stages of the project. We include a discussion of some of the new features available in the latest versions of the software.