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Anthropology

Qualitative Methods

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

James Mullooly

To prepare to work with Atlas/ti (one of the most popular and most powerful qualitative data analysis software packages) review the following where I and others discuss some of the benefits and pitfalls of qualitative data analysis software.

1. Read the PowerPoint by Michelle C. Bligh, Ph.D.
Using Qualitative Data Analysis Software
Claremont Graduate University March 18, 2005

It provides a great general overview of qualitative software.
Further (optional) reading could include:

If you visit any of the following, your goal would be to better familiarize yourself with the notion of coding in qualitative research and the idea of “grounded theory”.[If the links don't work, copy and past them into your browser]

A. Codebook Development for Team-Based Qualitative Analysis
Kathleen M. MacQueen, Eleanor McLellan, Kelly Kay and Bobby Milstein http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/software/pubs/codebook.pdf

B. Bobbi A. Kerlin, Ph.D. Chapter 6 On Coding http://kerlins.net/bobbi/research/nudist/coding/strategies.html

2. Click here to go to Atlas/ti to download a Free Trial Version of the software. http://www.atlasti.com/download.php

3. Read my presentation With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Teaching the benefits of qualitative software while maintaining an inductive approach to the analysis of data (Mullooly)

4. In preparation for a presentation on this subject, it is helpful to bring any ethnographic notes you may have. With your own notes, you can download them into the free version of Atlas/ti and do some coding activities.

NOTE: To facilitate easy coding, it is easiest if you use block paragraphing in your note taking but this is not a requirement.

That is, rather than indenting, skip a line to start a new paragraph (like I did here).