Atlas ti Software for Qualitative Data Analysis

At the National University of Singapore (where I am attending a course on Quantitative Text Analysis), we had a session on Atlas.ti, a software package that does some qualitative analysis. It is quite neat! Hope to use it in future (sometime soon).

The most interesting thing is, you can use multimedia documents- text, including PDF files, audio, video or photographs and analyse them after coding them into known or experimental categories- deductively or inductively. There is also an Auto-code feature that lets you do coding from the data by scanning the documents, without your specifying the code. You can use the software for focus group data (video), or transcribed data from depth interviews.

That makes it versatile and useful for any kind of input, and outputs can be counts of words or how often each occurs in each document (in the form of an EXCEL file), or plots, etc.. not fully explored all the options yet.

But a good thing to have, for mixed methods or purely qualitative research.

Learning in Singapore

Just a short reminder to myself that it's nice to be on the other side of a class. It builds empathy for poor students that we subject to so much in a day..in a Quantitative Text Analysis course in the National University of Singapore, or NUS..the prof. (Inaki) is from Texas Tech, Lubbock..I also got reminded of how much I hate programming and love packages of software. We are using R, a programmable software out here. I am with a group of students from the US, Germany, and Singapore, and they are mostly half my age..the class itself has more from other nationalities/places and speakers of languages from there. Many are doing a doctorate in political science, economics, etc.

Large masses of text can be analysed using the methods we are learning. Political speeches, press releases, tweets, Facebook posts/comments, and what not, can be analysed in different ways, for word frequencies, co-occurrence of words, and even sentiment behind the words in some ways.

Amazing what a dumb computer is capable of, if intelligent humans can get it to work..now, if I can just get that program going..

SPSS Workshop at Chennai

IMT is doing a workshop at Chennai for faculty and research scholars, of which I will be a part. On April 6th, 7th and 8th. That is, later this week. This is a skill I picked up while I was getting a Ph.D. in the US of A at Clemson. It has served me well since, and I find its actual use (correct use, if I might add) remains rare in India even today. Mostly, it is because faculty trained in using it are not many. And therefore their research scholars face a handicap.

We have tried to contribute our mite by doing these workshops from the point of view of practitioners/Ph.D. scholars rather than mathematicians- we aren't mathematicians to begin with, anyway. But the user needs to know his needs and some really basic statistics to be able to use this statistical package for his analysis needs. So that is what we try to provide, a little background of what is needed, and some hands-on experience so that the user starts using it, and learns by himself after a while. Tried this at IIM Kozhikode and IFIM Bangalore too, and it was well-received.

Why Chennai? Well, why not? There is demand everywhere, so we'll go wherever the market is. Plan to collaborate with other B schools in future, wherever they might be.