Qualitative research tools

As a somewhat seasoned qualitative researcher, I am always on the lookout for tools to improve the coding process for going through interview transcripts, particularly since I'm a fan of grounded theory. (As an aside, read this book to find out more about grounded theory or read my advisors take on the theory, noting that the strong-point of this approach is how operationalizable the steps are). I've used everything from MS Excel, to the open source tool Weft QDA to track codes for quotes and for open and axial coding.

Weft QDA was several steps up from Excel, allowing you to digitally annotate documents with codes and categorize them into higher level codes. However, using Weft, all documents have to be converted to plain text and the software is a little buggy. But on the other hand, given the unforgiving graduate student budget, this makes for a good option if you want to manage your codes digitally.

Recently, I started using Atlas.ti with a student licence and I am utterly pleased. The tool allows for easy open coding (or creating new codes), and you can also select from codes you've already created. I'm especially a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts for the coding process. What's better is that you can easily group codes into "Families" for axial coding. The tool also gives you counts of how many times a code has occurred and makes it easy to view quotes associated with a particular code, or family of codes, both in the editor or for printing purposes.

So for me, I'll look no further than Atlas.ti for now and I highly recommend investing in it if you can spare the change and you're a fan of having a digital copy of a qualitative analysis (even though its still nice to shift pieces of paper and post-its around!).