What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is based on this deep understanding of people and issues. Often it's about listening to people's voices, either through an interview, or a detailed survey. Sometimes a group discussion makes the issue come alive, and focus groups can illustrate the dynamics of many actors. We can also understand an issue by looking at what has already been written about a topic, for example through document analysis of newspaper articles, research findings or government policies.

But to get this depth of understanding requires a lot of time, and a lot of data. Not quantity, but quality (this is where qualitative comes from). Not thousands of short questionnaires, but dozens of detailed stories.

Managing all this detailed data can be time consuming. There's a lot to read, and to get to a picture that can be communicated and acted on, a researcher has to summarise and find common themes. And it's not usually a process that can be done automatically. If you want to show the difference between when someone is angry because they are threatened, and angry because they are wronged, it needs a human reader to see the nuance. Computers are not subtle enough for this work yet, and they can't guess what a researcher might be interested in investigating! Qualitative data analysis is inherently a manual process.

At its heart, Quirkos helps people manage, sort and understand text sources. That means it can be useful to anyone that works with large amounts of written material. It's been used by doctors' surgeries for evaluations, universities for research projects, and market research firms for understanding customer trends.

In public services, evaluation and feedback on policy or service changes can be analysed together with statute and governance documents. Authors, historians, policy developers, charities, think-tanks and lobbyists could all use Quirkos to manage their text sources, and communicate their findings visually. Users could even include lawyers: comparing depositions, quoting laws, and referencing previous cases.

Product development teams can get customer feedback from e-mails, surveys and focus groups analysed right next to the product brief. In market research, companies can investigate the market, get feedback from users and potential customers, and integrate this with expert reports.

Researchers might also use Quirkos for literature reviews, writing a paper, or completing a Masters or PhD thesis by keeping other articles, sources, and references together. Students can use it for school projects, looking at newspaper articles on a curriculum topic, or doing a survey of classmates. Quirkos can let young researchers play and explore text data, helping them find new patterns and challenging their assumptions.

And unlike most qualitative analysis software, Quirkos is so intuitive that participants and clients can use it to engage in the analysis with you, making end users, who are the real experts, part of the process.

Find out more about the features of Quirkos here, or read about the general functions of software for qualitative analysis. We also have dozens of articles on our blog about general qualitative research issues.