Lyn Richards

This paper identifies criteria seen as essential to feminist research. In light of these criteria, issues which have arisen during our current research on women and their experiences of midlife and menopause are discussed. Issues considered include the researchers' responsibilities to participants when exploring sensitive and highly personal issues...

Welcome to the "do-it-yourself" tutorials for researchers and students who wish to learn NVivo 8. These ten tutorials take you through the basic functions of the NVivo 8 software, with guidance to its interface and processes, as you set up and commence your own project. These are edited versions of my tutorials for the earlier NVivo 7, with new ill...

The organization, processing and representation of knowledge becomes increasingly important in all scientific and business contexts. This book focuses on qualitative methods for knowledge organization and their contributions to knowledge-based issues of marketing management research. Besides theoretical discussions of different approaches to and de...

Qualitative research methodologies are gaining more and more acceptance. This book deals with the application of qualitative methods to marketing management research. It explains different ways of making and analyzing data with qualitative tools, and it describes the generation of results working for researchers as well as for practitioners in mark...

Qualitative research techniques are used when there is a need for a new understanding of a situation. To achieve an understanding of complex situations, the challenge faced by the researcher is to manage that complexity. This chapter shows that all qualitative research requires knowledge organisation. Managing the overwhelming detail of data and pu...

Specialized computer programs for Qualitative Research in social sciences have greatly changed ways of doing QR, the reliability and comprehensiveness of results, the ability to inspect and challenge a researcher's working, and the relationship with quantitative methods in social research. This article explores these claims in the context of N6 (NU...

Qualitative sociology relies heavily on "emergence" of themes, construction of categories "out of" the data and linking of those categories to form theories. The literature is clear on the goals of theme emergence and theory construction, but not nearly so clear on the ways their relationships to data are established, or the processes by which cate...

To explore whether qualitative methods are problematic and persuasive in health education research. Explored this problem through the 3 goals of rigor, rapidity, and reliability and their special meanings in qualitative analysis. For each, contributions of qualitative computing software are identified and their effects assessed. Qualitative researc...

Qualitative computing is often described by enthusiasts as revolutionary, but in stark contrast, its methodological innovations are rarely discussed. Why is the debate missing? The paper charts some of the major developments in support for coding and theory-building, exploring the many reasons why these are either taken for granted or unrecognized...

Rich data from qualitative research have been treated poorly by computers. Yet, plain text and static documents largely have been uncritically accepted as a price of coding. The new qualitative software from Qualitative Solutions and Research (QSR), NUD•IST Vivo (NVivo), challenges that assumption. This article explores the goals of rich data in qu...

An essential goal of all qualitative researchers is getting close to data. Recently, that goal has gained prominence without critical examination. Pursuit of closeness poses risks and requires careful specification. This article identifies four very different meanings of "closeness to data." Although being close to data in each of these senses is e...

In our paper in the Denzin & Lincoln volume (Richards & Richards (1994)), we made a distinction between the conceptual and textual levels of work in qualitative data analysis (QDA), and argued that future work in the computerisation of QDA would involve finding ways of crossing the gap from the textual to the conceptual levels. In this paper we wil...

look at methodological features of qualitative data analysis (QDA) to consider how, and how much, and how well, it can be computerized / give an overview of general-purpose packages that can be used in QDA, and some types of special-purpose QDA packages / discuss how they can be used and how well they work / provide some pointers to future software...

This paper exploits the thesis (Popper, Koestler) that one significant locus of creativity lies in the process of making sense of data. Data-driven thinking, to be opposed to hypothesis-driven thinking, concerns approaching more or less unstruc­tured, uninformed, raw data and wondering how it can be explained, or cohered.

The analysis of unstructured information, particularly in the form of text, has long been a technique in the armory of social scientists, who have to deal with conversational records, historical documents, unstructured interviews, and the like. Unsurprisingly, a considerable amount of methodological literature has developed on the subject. The meth...

Most computer approaches to qualitative data analysis have concentrated on coding and retrieval of text. This paper describes a research project which set out to support a range of methods for the analysis of unstructured data, with emphasis on the building and testing of grounded theory. It resulted in software whose innovations include: a) No lim...

The dream of suburban home ownership continues to appeal to many men and women. Yet the realities of this dream often translate into a house where "nobody's home" because everyone must work to pay off the high costs of ownership. Nobody's Home studies the dream and its social results. Based on five years observing one Australian suburb, it probes t...

In all fields where qualitative data are important, and especially in fields where rigorous qualitative analysis is demanded, computers are remaking methodology. Demand for, and faith in, computing for qualitative analysis is now strongly influencing health research. In this article, the authors argue for an evaluation of the impact of computer tec...

Qualitative data analysis is an approach to the use of unstructured data that is widely practised (and studied) in the social sciences, history and literary studies. It is used in many areas derivative from social sciences, such as market analysis, legal evidence analysis, health and demographic studies, education, journalism, etc. It is also comin...

Qualitative data analysis contains built-in constraints - on volume of records, complexity of analysis, detail of classification and ability to explore emergent theory. Those constraints, rarely acknowledged, conflict with goals central to the method. The article describes one response, a system for computer-aided indexing, searching and analysis o...