Course Feedback

The course was very helpful to me in terms of getting a handle on the types of technology that are avaiable to use for research. I began the course with the knowledge that bibiographic mangagers exist, and that's about it. The qualtitative research courses do not delve into technology much at all, so this course is a useful supplement. I'm grateful that I decided to take it so early in my program.

I have already used ExpressScribe and I definitely plan to use EndNote and WEFT QDA in the future. I appreciated the nice variety of software that was introduced because I think everyone will ultimately have different needs based on their particular research. Because of that, I wouldn't suggest eliminating any of the tools that were covered. I can't really imagine myself using Evernote, for example, but that doesn't mean it won't be useful to someone else.

In the future it might be nice to load any of the CAQDAS that has a free trial onto the lab computers so that we could compare them to WEFT QDA - maybe try coding a bit in each to see if there is a significant difference. I don't know if there would be a problem with reloading the free trial each quarter though. At least I know what is out there now and have the option to do that on my own.

Overall, the course was great. Thanks Laurie!

New Video

I recorded a new video since the one I did in class was difficult to work with. It gave me a chance to try out the camera on my computer.

QDA Miner

I have to say, I read through the article and had no idea which CAQDAS to try. I decided to check out QDA Miner because I like the name. I didn’t check the price of any of the others, but this one is $555 for the academic version, with add-ons for statistical and content analysis that range from $255-$525. I like that it has a statistical analysis feature - Simstat. I can imagine wanting to incorporate some statistics into qualitative research, but many of us are not really trained in that, so I’m guess a software package like this would be a nice tool. I’m really interested in the Wordstat add-on, which does content analysis and text mining. The reviews I read seemed to agree that the data coding feature in QDA miner is user friendly. There is also a multi-user feature for collaborative projects. There is a free 30 day trial for the full version of the software, so I would definitely want to try it out extensively before deciding to spend that kind of money.

Audacity

For some reason, I was having great difficult downloading Movie Maker. I kept getting a message saying that it was not compatible with Vista. Then I realized I already have it!! It must have come preinstalled on my computer. I felt very smart after all of that.

Then I couldn't convert my video from .mov to .wmv. I downloaded a free trial of a converter, but it would only convert 20% since it's a trial version. At that point, I gave up and decided to work with my audio file instead. I experimeted with editing my file in Audacity. I made some cuts and spliced segments together, so the file posted here might not make sense at all in some places. Overall, I think Audacity seems user friendly and is not too difficult to learn.

RefWorks Review

I decided to play around with RefWorks since I am not currently using a bibliographic manager and I get the sense that I need to choose one soon.

I do like the organizational capabilities. It was easy to set up different folders and move things around.

RefWorks is easy to use with the OSU libray catalog. However, I found some articles where the option to export the citation to RefWorks was not an option. For example, a citation from ISI Web of Knowledge only had the options for Endnote, RefMan, and ProCite. It was possible to download the whole article, so I'm not quite sure why RefWorks wasn't an option in this instance. Maybe it's just because I really don't know what I'm doing yet!

It took me a little while to figure out how to attach files to a reference, but it does have that capability.

Overall, it seems like a pretty good tool, but after Mitsu's praise of EndNote, I may be leaning in that direction.