It’s easy to get seduced by the excitement of primary data collection, and plan your qualitative research around methods that give you rich data from face-to-face contact with participants. But some research questions may be better illustrated or even mostly answered by analysis of existing documents.   This ‘desk-based’ research often doesn’t seem as fun, but can provide a very important wider context that

Quirkos is now 3 years old! To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our regular programming of qualitative method posts to remind everyone why Quirkos is the best qualitative analysis software around...   1. All the colours! Obviously I’m going to start with the most important features first. Some qualitative analysis software restricts you to only 8 colours when customising your themes. Quirkos lets you choose from 16

  Qualitative software used to need you to format text files in very specific ways before they could be imported. These days the software is much more capable and means you can import nearly any kind of text data in any kind of formatting, which allows for a lot more flexibility. However, that easy-going nature can let you get away with some pretty lazy habits. You’ll probably find your analysis (and even data collection and

  Training researchers to use qualitative software and helping people who get stuck with Quirkos, I get to see a lot of people’s coding frameworks. Most of the time they are great, often they are fine but have too many codes, but sometimes they just seem to lack a little balance. In good quality quantitative research, you should see the researchers have adopted a ‘null hypothesis’ before they start the analysis. In

  What’s this blog post about? Well, it’s visualised in the graphic above!   In the latest update for Quirkos, we have added a new and much requested feature, word clouds! I'm sure you've used these pretty tools before, they show a random display of all the words in a source of text, where the size of each word is proportional to the number of times it has been counted in the text. There are several free online tools that