Session: Integrating ATLAS.Ti with Data Management Software (Society for Social Work and Research 15th Annual Conference: Emerging Horizons for Social Work Research)

The aim of this workshop is to integrate qualitative research methods (e.g., thematic, grounded theory, and narrative) with data management and analytic software. The workshop will introduce participants to software that records, sorts, and analyzes large quantities of interview data, which can be used for thematic, grounded theory, or narrative analysis. The techniques demonstrated in the workshop will be useful to research and evaluation projects that collect hundreds of short-answer survey questions and longitudinal projects that collect hundreds of recorded responses over months or years. Imagine managing a five-year project studying youth attitudes and experiences of psychiatric medication; the research aim might be to compare the ADHD psychostimulant experiences among different ethnic groups of males and females. Moreover, the project: utilizes a questionnaire with twenty-five, open-ended questions; enrolls 200 youth (100 males and 100 females from four ethnic groups); and, interviews respondents four times annually for five years. In short, 100,000 responses ranging in length from fifteen seconds to five minutes is available for data management and analysis. Software technology is available to store, manage, and analyze thousands of open-ended, recorded, questionnaire responses (The workshop will not be demonstrating voice recognition software. Instead, the use of transcribed data is assumed; however, software can be used to listen and code audio or video data.). Qualitative studies no longer need to limit their research design to one interview per respondent, as they can easily concatenate multiple interviews. Indeed, digital recordings have replaced cassette tapes, which typically were stored on a shelf or in a drawer and never re-analyzed. Moreover, software makes it possible to use qualitative datasets for secondary analysis, allowing students and collaborators to easily conduct reliability and validity checks and to answer new questions. In short, qualitative researchers will enter a new era if they utilize the use of software packages, some expensive and some inexpensive.