The use of qualitative data analysis software: a mapping thesis in mathematics education

This paper characterizes the use of qualitative data analysis software in doctoral theses about Mathematics Education developed in Brazil, from 2010 to 2019, to support the choices of these software from paths already followed by other researchers. For this, a mapping was made to identify the theses and the aspects related to the use of these software in the field. The investigation retrieved 651 doctoral theses available in the Brazilian Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertations in which only 31 of them compose the corpus of this paper. This number evidences the little use of these software in the analyzed area. In the corpus, it was observed the predominance of the qualitative approach and the identification of nine different software, being three the most used: Atlas.ti, NVivo and CHIC, in that order. The adoption of software, as described by the authors, is linked to their potential regarding categorization, organization, visualization, data handling, time optimization and analysis facilitation and the possibility of enabling exploration of large volumes and diversity of data