Table 1. Analytical capabilities of some well-known QDA software along with the WordCommentsAnalyzer capabilities.
The table presents analytical capabilities of three popular commercial QDA software tools and one free, open source QDA program along with features of WordCommentsAnalyzer. Because the focus of WordCommentsAnalyzer is on the analytic work after coding data, we did not include features of these software tools used for raw data manipulation and/or coding. Although WordCommentsAnalyzer offers no memo-writing or mind-mapping features, it provides features to do simple queries on the codes and to organize them in a hierarchy. In addition, it provides basic visualization tools.
| MAXQDA 2018 (Commercial) | |
|---|---|
| Create memos and attach to the
codes or data |
• The user can create free and attached memos (attached to documents, codes, etc.)
• The user can log notes about the research process in the logbook. • Other writing tools included are paraphrases, comments, and summaries. |
| Search and interrogate the dataset | • The user can see frequency of codes across the dataset.
• The software provides Boolean and proximity operators for retrieving coded text. • The user can find co-occurrences of codes in up to six dimensions. |
| Visualize codes and the data | • The user can get a big picture of tones of codes in a document (Document Portrait),
see counts of codes per document (Code Matrix Browser) or counts of sets of two codes across the whole dataset (Code Relations Browser). The user can also see how paragraphs in a document are coded (Code Line) and compare this to other documents (Document Comparison Chart). • The software provides MAXMaps which is a tool allowing visual mapping of all aspects of the project. The user can also add items not existent in the project to the map or create a ‘free’ mind map. MAXMaps provides a variety of automatic templates to generate visualizations, e.g., a map of codes hierarchy or a map showing code co-occurrences. |
| Nvivo 12 (Commercial) | |
| Create memos and attach to the
codes or data |
• The user can create memos and link sources to them.
• The user can link a source to only one memo. |
| Search and interrogate the dataset | • The user can see frequency of codes across the dataset.
• The software provides various types of queries to search text, find cases with a combination of codes, attributes and/or specific texts • The queries can be saved for later use. |
| Visualize codes and the data | • A variety of visualization tools including Mind Maps, Concept Maps, Project Maps,
Matrix Query, and charts of cluster analyses of word similarity. |
| Atlas.ti 8 (Commercial) | |
| Create memos and attach to the
codes or data |
• The user can create memos and link them to Quotations, codes and other memos. The
user can also write Comments which are spaces granted specifically to different project components (e.g., Code Comments). |
| Search and interrogate the dataset | • The user can search for words in the name, content or comments of the project
components (e.g. codes, documents, memos, groups, networks, etc.), with an option to search on the basis of the user that created the components. • The Query Tool provides Boolean and proximity operators for retrieving quotations based on the codes. Additionally, it provides 3 semantic operators (UP, DOWN, SIBLINGS) allowing retrieval based on the presence of transitive links between codes. • The user can retrieve Quotations based on two-code co-occurrences in a tree view (Co-Occurrence Explorer) or a matrix (Co-Occurrence Table). |
| Visualize codes and the data | • The user can create highly customized networks of the linked components. The user
can arrange the components in a network using a number of automatic layouts offered. • The software shows the relationships between codes in the Co-Occurrence Table. The table cells have shades of colors which indicate the strength of the relationship by c-coefficient. |
| RQDA 0.3-1 (Free, Open source) | |
| Create memos and attach to the
codes or data |
• The user can create memos for codes, cases, and files but not for individual data
extracts. |
| Search and interrogate the dataset | • The user can search codes effectively by R commands but cannot search the codes for
particular words in the GUI when they code data extracts, organize codes, etc. |
| Visualize codes and the data | • The software can create a map of codes belonging to code categories and arrange
them by a number of automatic layouts. |
| WordCommentsAnalyzer 2.0.3.0
(Free, Open source) |
|
| Create memos and attach to the
codes or data |
• The software does not provide the memo-writing feature. |
| Search and interrogate the dataset | • The user can see frequency of codes across the dataset.
• The user can search the code list or code hierarchy for particular words when organizing the codes. |
| Visualize codes and the data | • The software provides a matrix of code co-occurrences for selected codes. The table
cells have shades of colors which indicate the strength of the relationship by c-coefficient. • The software provides the File Code Matrix which visualizes codes in the Word files by a matrix of circles of varying size. The radius of circles inside the table cells represents the relative number of paragraphs coded by different codes in each file. |