Episode 26: Episode 26: CAQDAS

In this episode, Amir Michalovich, PhD Candidate at University of British Columbia, interviews Dr. Christina Sliver on Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis. They cover a wide range of issues and topics within CAQDAS, share numbers resources and recommendations, and talk at length about how graduate students might benefit from CAQDAS. The follow is the transcript of their conversation.

Amir 0:25
Hello, everyone, welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Amir Michalovich, a member of the graduate students committee of the qualitative research special interest group, and a doctoral candidate in the department of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia. As a guest podcast host. I'll be speaking today with Dr. Christina Silver on computer assisted qualitative data analysis, otherwise known as CAQDAS with a specific view of how graduate students might employ it, the kinds of challenges that they might face and some of the ways to address those challenges. Dr. Christina Silver manages the cognitive networking project based in the Department of Sociology in the University of Surrey in the UK, for which she leads the training and capacity building activities. She's the co founder and director of QDAS Qualitative Data Analysis Services, which provides customized consultancy services for individuals and groups engaged in qualitative analysis. She has many years of experience teaching CAQDAS, and has written extensively on the learning and adoption of CAQDAS. Christina is co author with an Lewin's of the book using software and qualitative analysis. And with Nick Wolf Of the five level QDA method. She has also published key articles and book chapters exploring the relationship between qualitative or mixed methodologies and technology, specifically, the use of dedicated contest packages. Alright, well, thank you, Christina, for joining us for this podcast episode. I am absolutely thrilled to speak with you today. I'd like to start with a basic question about CAQDAS. What is CAQDAS? And why should graduate students consider using CAQDAS software?

Christina 2:16
Okay, so Hi, thanks a lot for inviting me, it's great to have this chat. So CAQDAS is an acronym that stands for computer assisted qualitative data analysis. So it's used to refer to software and other applications digital tools that have been specifically designed to facilitate qualitative and mixed methods analysis. It's an acronym that was developed in around 1991, by Nigel fielding and reily, after they convened the first conference, looking at software to facilitate qualitative analysis. So now it's used as an umbrella term to relate to all of these digital tools of which there are now dozens available. The thing about CAQDAS packages in terms of their use by students, graduate students, also undergraduate students and other researchers is that they are one of the kind of tactics that we have available at our disposal to operationalize our analyses. There are some debates about their use. And that's something that we'll probably touch on later on in our discussion. For me, you know, it's really important at the outset to realize that, although there are many ways that CAQDAS packages can facilitate analysis, they can help us organize our data, they can help us access different aspects of our analysis process, it's still possible to do bad analysis using CAQDAS packages, just like it's possible to do good analysis without using them. So that's a really important starting point in thinking about whether and how to use these kinds of tools. But for me, you know, really, the main thing is the access that it gets to the process. So using a dedicated CAQDAS package gives us access to the materials that we're working with. And that will be the data that we're working with the qualitative dat