I recently started my field study and being it a formative, exploratory study I'm using the grounded theory methodology. I'm only one-third of the way through my tool's deployment and I'm already kind of drowning in data: with usage logs and email interviews, I've got a lot of data on hand. That doesn't even count the face-to-face interviews at the end of my study.
I've automated some of the usage log analysis, but I'm still having to do a lot of manual coding. This is the first time I've conducted a real research study and in my naiveness I started coding data in a text editor at first. I soon realized that this was not only an extremely painful method to code data, it was also error-prone. It would be nice to code on paper, but I'm really not keen on lugging around reams of archival notes.
So I went hunting for some software-based tools to help me out. A quick google for "qualitative data analysis tools" led me to this listing of tools. Most on the list are high-priced, off-the-shelf systems. An open source tool called TAMS Analyzer caught my eye though and I decided to give it a try.
TAMS Analyzer (an acronym for Text Analysis Markup System) is a GUI tool that runs on Mac OS X and it seems there is also a GNUstep port. According to the website, it is developed by Matthew Weinstein, an Associate Professor of Science Education at Kent State University.
You can use TAMS to manage and code all the text-based artifacts in your project and it even has some basic reporting features. It has really powerful search features and it makes coding data a breeze. The user interface takes some getting used to, but once you find your way, it gets the job done nicely. It's certainly suitable for my needs.
(TAMS screenshot from Sourceforge.net)
As shown in this screenshot, you can even manage multimedia files from interviews and associate them with a text-based transcript in TAMS. Thanks, TAMS! I'm curious, though: how do other researchers manage their qualitative data?
