Staff of the project will contribute regularly to the Bulletin, both with news of the Project's activities, and with articles about various aspects of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. In this first contribution I will outline some key characteristics of the software that researchers need to bear in mind when deciding between different packages. However, researchers tend to encounter these packages in a haphazard way, so that adopting a particular package may not be an informed choice.
Packages inevitably reflect developers' assumptions about the nature of qualitative analysis.
It is important to begin by saying what this software does in general. The software cannot analyse your data for you, only help. To some extent, the help it can give depends on the type of software it is. We often need to sort the data into categories by marking codes on the transcript or other text so that we can see which segments represent each category. Text retrievers allow you to recover the data pertaining to each category on the basis of keywords that appear in the data.