Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. In contrast with ethnology, ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research involving the examination of the behaviour of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behaviour. It describes a group or culture
Qualitative psychological research is psychological research that employs qualitative methods.
Qualitative research relies on unstructured and non-numerical data. The data include field notes written by the researcher during the course of his or her observation, interviews and questionnaires, focus groups, participant-observation, audio or video recordings carried out by the researcher in natural settings, documents of various kinds, and even material artifacts. The use of these data is informed by various methodological or philosophical assumptions, as part of various methods, such as ethnography, discourse analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis and other phenomenological methods. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, social work, and educational research.
In natural and social sciences, and maybe in other fields, quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories, and hypotheses pertaining to phenomena. The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empirical observation and mathematical expression of quantitative relationships.
Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyse social phenomena is its non-invasive nature, in contrast to simulating social experiences or collecting survey answers.
Grounded theory (GT) is a systematic methodology in the social sciences involving the construction of theories through methodical gathering and analysis of data. This research methodology uses inductive reasoning, in contrast to the hypothetico-deductive model of the scientific method. A study using grounded theory is likely to begin with a question, or even just with the collection of qualitative data. As researchers review the data collected, repeated ideas, concepts or elements become apparent, and are tagged with codes, which have been extracted from the data. As more data are collected, and re-reviewed, codes can be grouped into concepts, and then into categories. These categories may become the basis for new theory. Thus, grounded theory is quite different from the traditional model of research, where the researcher chooses an existing theoretical framework, and only then collects data to show how the theory does or does not apply to the phenomenon under study.
Jikes Research Virtual Machine is a mature virtual machine that runs programs written for the Java platform. Unlike most other Java virtual machines (JVMs), it is written in the programming language Java, in a style of implementation termed meta-circular. It is free and open source software released under an Eclipse Public License.
MALLET is a Java "Machine Learning for Language Toolkit".
ATLAS.ti is a computer program used mostly, but not exclusively, in qualitative research or qualitative data analysis.
In the social sciences, coding is an analytical process in which data, in both quantitative form or qualitative form are categorized to facilitate analysis.
Transana is a software package used to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana used to be a GPL licensed software, but has become proprietary software in recent releases.
CAT or Coding Analysis Toolkit is a web-based suite of CAQDAS tools. It is free and open source software, and is developed by the Qualitative Data Analysis Program of the University of Pittsburgh
MAXQDA is a software program designed for computer-assisted qualitative and mixed methods data, text and multimedia analysis in academic, scientific, and business institutions. It is being developed and distributed by VERBI Software based in Berlin, Germany.
QSR International is a qualitative research software developer based in Melbourne, Australia, with offices in the United Kingdom, and the United States. QSR International is the developer of qualitative data analysis (QDA) software products, NVivo, NVivo Server, Interpris and XSight. These are designed to help qualitative researchers organize and analyze non-numerical or unstructured data.
Aquad is a free computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) that supports content analysis of open data in qualitative research in psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, medicine, ethnography, politics, etc. Open data are usually collected through observation, introspection, narratives, discussion groups, interviews, etc.
QDA Miner is a mixed methods and qualitative data analysis software developed by Provalis Research. The program was designed to assist researchers in managing, coding and analyzing qualitative data.
Thematic analysis is one of the most common forms of analysis within qualitative research. It emphasizes identifying, analysing and interpreting patterns of meaning within qualitative data. Thematic analysis is often understood as a method or technique in contrast to most other qualitative analytic approaches - such as grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis - which can be described as methodologies or theoretically informed frameworks for research. Thematic analysis is best thought of as an umbrella term for a variety of different approaches, rather than a singular method. Different versions of thematic analysis are underpinned by different philosophical and conceptual assumptions and are divergent in terms of procedure. Leading thematic analysis proponents, psychologists Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke distinguish between three main types of thematic analysis: coding reliability approaches, code book approaches and reflexive approaches. They describe their own widely used approach first outlined in 2006 in the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology as reflexive thematic analysis. Their 2006 paper has over 59,000 Google Scholar citations and according to Google Scholar is the most cited academic paper published in 2006. The popularity of this paper exemplifies the growing interest in thematic analysis as a distinct method.
Cassandre is a free open source software for computer assisted qualitative data analysis and interpretation in humanities and social sciences. Although it refers, like other CAQDAS-software, to Grounded Theory Method, it also allows to conduct discourse analysis or quantitative content analysis. The software is designed as a server to support collaborative work. Formerly focused on semi-automatic coding, it now provides diaries assisting qualitative analysis.
KH Coder is an open source software for computer assisted qualitative data analysis, particularly quantitative content analysis and text mining. It can be also used for computational linguistics. It supports processing and etymological information of text in several languages, such as Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Specifically, it can contribute factual examination co-event system hub structure, computerized arranging guide, multidimensional scaling and comparative calculations.
Quirkos is a CAQDAS software package for the qualitative analysis of text data, commonly used in social science. It provides a graphical interface in which the nodes or themes of analysis are represented by bubbles. It is designed primarily for new and non-academic users of qualitative data, to allow them to quickly learn the basics of qualitative data analysis. Although simpler to use, it lacks some of the features present in other commercial CAQDAS packages such as multimedia support. However, it has been proposed as a useful tool for lay and participant led analysis and is comparatively affordable. It is developed by Edinburgh, UK based Quirkos Software, and was first released in October 2014.
