Abstract
There is a lack of free software that provides a professional and smooth experience in text editing and markup for qualitative data analysis. Word processing software like Microsoft Word provides a good editing experience, allowing the researcher to effortlessly add comments to text portions. However, organizing the keywords and categories in the comments can become a more difficult task when the amount of data increases. We present WordCommentsAnalyzer, a software tool that is written in C# using .NET Framework and OpenXml, which helps a qualitative researcher to organize codes when using Microsoft Word as the primary text markup software. WordCommentsAnalyzer provides an effective user interface to count codes, to organize codes in a code hierarchy, and to see various data extracts belonging to each code. We illustrate how to use the software by conducting a preliminary content analysis on Tweets with the #successfulaging hashtag. We hope this open-source software will facilitate qualitative data analysis by researchers who are interested in using Word for this purpose.
Highlights
Commercial qualitative data analysis (QDA) software tools such as NVivo and Atlas.ti seem to be the most popular in the qualitative research community[1]
We present WordCommentsAnalyzer, a free, open-source tool that makes it possible for qualitative researchers to automate organization of the qualitative codes through a fast and easy-to-learn user interface while coding the textual material using Microsoft Word as a professional, familiar word procesing software
OpenXml provides an easy way to query comments from a document
Summary
Commercial qualitative data analysis (QDA) software tools such as NVivo and Atlas.ti seem to be the most popular in the qualitative research community[1]. Free or open-source solutions that are available often do not provide a smooth editing and markup experience (e.g., QDA Miner Lite does not support Persian and Arabic languages; CATMA and CAT2 are not fast due to their web-based nature). For these reasons, some researchers use professional word processing programs for their qualitative research projects. We present WordCommentsAnalyzer, a free, open-source tool that makes it possible for qualitative researchers to automate organization of the qualitative codes through a fast and easy-to-learn user interface while coding the textual material using Microsoft Word as a professional, familiar word procesing software
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