[Air-l] qualitative analysis of discussion board postings

[Denise N. Rall]

Dear Ulrike -

Charlie mentioned NuDIST. Due to problems with spam,
they have changed the name of the software to N6. 
However they have another program called Nvivo that is
particularly for qualitative work.

I found the software brilliant and easy to deal with
my data but it does cost. It may be too expensive. It
is helpful, I used N6 and I could use the logical
Boolean functions and a few others to join up and
transform data sets, really it was good. The best
thing is, unlike a podcast, you can know which
narrative streams you are connecting as the texts are
entered discretely and you can get a line by line
numbering system so you know exactly where you are in
the interview or posting.

The company is QSR international and it is in English
only I susupect but that seems not a problem for you.
www.qsrinternational.com/products/productoverview/product_overview.htm

They have a 30 day download so you might do that
first. Regarding the legalities, yes I would beware of
downloading postings without permission of some kind.

Cheers, Denise




--- Ulrike Pfeil <UlrikePfeil at gmx.net> wrote:

> Dear All
> I am currently starting my PhD in the area of CMC. I
> am especially interested in the phenomenon of
> empathy and how it manifests in online
> communication. In my current study, I investigate
> message postings from a (quite emotional) discussion
> board and through grounded theory came up with a
> detailed categorisation scheme of the content. Apart
> from the basic statistics with the codings, I would
> like to relate the patterns I found in the online
> discussion board to the phenomenon of empathy in
> offline communication. However, I struggle with the
> approach I should take. I have read about different
> kinds of qualitative analysis (like thematic
> analysis, discourse analysis and some parts of
> content analysis...) but I am not sure how exactly
> to go about it. Does anybody have experience with
> this kind of analysis (relation of coding results to
> general characteristics of a phenomenon like
> empathy)  or can recommend literature that might
> help me? It would not be a problem to write about it
> but I am searching for a more "prescribed
> procedure". Does anybody know of similar studies? I
> also thought about using word frequencies and
> concordances for the analysis - does anybody have
> any recommendation concerning this? Any help would
> be greatly appreciated!
> Kind regards,
> Ulrike
> -- 
> 
> 
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Denise N. Rall, PhD thesis in revision, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA
Tuesdays: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0427 245 497
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html

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