Non-Numeric (Qualitative) Data: Analyzing Data

The following tools are available to analyze your qualitative data sets. 

• Atlas.ti *available at UNLV 
• MaxDQ *unavailable at UNLV 
• NVivo
• R (freely available on the web)

Listed below are some good examples of high-performance Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) platforms that are free of charge. Some have graphical user interfaces (GUI) and others do not. Some investigation will be required to determine what will best suit your needs

• Aquad

  Aquad is a platform developed in Germany (you will have to translate the website, which is also in German) that supports text of any kind, audio, video, and image files. There is a plugin available to use with R, the open source statistical analysis software.
• Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT)

  CAT was designed to utilize keystrokes rather than the mouse as a coding assistant. CAT can import an ATLAS.ti project to parse quantitatively, though it has a coding mechanism built into itself as well. CAT won the Best Research Software award from the Information Technology & Politics in the American Political Science Association in 2008. CAT is Web based.
• Compendium

  Compendium models itself as an application to visualize the connections between information and ideas. It is very visually based and offers similar functionality as most CAQDAS platforms. Please note: the program and code are still available, but are no longer maintained as of 2014.
• QDA Miner Lite

  A "lite" version of the proprietary software, QDA Miner Lite has a slightly limited functionality. You can still perform the basic functions of the full version but don't have some of the more advanced options. You can see all the differences in the side by side comparison.
• RQDA

  RQDA is another package from the exciting R Project, a statistical analysis platform that has developed a constantly growing community of users and developers that is designing all sorts of software for use in data analysis. What a plugin to such a power statistics program means is that implementing quantitative data to your project will be seamless and effective.
• Weft QDA

  Weft was a project by a student who was fed up with the pricing of many of the proprietary software providers. Weft provides solid coding capabilities of text in addition to full text search using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). There is no visualization capabilities. Unfortunately, Weft has been abandoned, so there is no support from the developers. Probably best used by researchers only looking to analyze text.