The Role of Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis: Impact on Emergent Methods in Qualitative Research

It can be somewhat of a shock for those who have been involved with an innovation when the innovation does not just become mainstream but begins to evolve. We might think with some sympathy about the feelings of the developers of the biplane when the monoplane came along, or those of the engineers busily refining the propellor engine when jets suddenly appeared over European skies in the late stages of World War II. For many researchers and methodologists, computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (‘CAQDAS’) is not yet even mainstream, but those involved in its development can now look back on twenty or so years’ experience, and change is fast in the computing world. Standard typologies already list several distinct generations of qualitative software, and there are new possibilities emerging that arise from the capacities of what is now a mature field of social science computing, while others arise from new computational resources that are just beginning to be applied to qualitative research. To see where we are going we have to know where we have been. The task of this chapter is therefore to provide an account of qualitative software and what it can currently do as a basis from which to then profile the new, incoming, and over-the-horizon possibilities being opened up. We will begin with a discussion of the emergence of qualitative software, and then review the different types of qualitative software and the kinds of work that researchers can do with them. We will then look at an emergent technique that has lately arisen from capacities that have been associated with CAQDAS for some time but have been under-exploited, namely methodological integration, the interrelation of qualitative and quantitative dimensions of social phenomena in the pursuit of fuller and more valid analyses. Finally, we will profile some new emergent techniques that can be glimpsed at their formative stage. These techniques relate to new developments in Grid computing and High Performance Computing (HPC)