Blog Posts

On the 17th March I was invited to give a keynote at the MAXDAYS 2026 Europe virtual conference .  I was grateful for the opportunity to talk about the relationship between methodology and technology, which is something I’ve spent much of my career thinking about . Here's what I said. You can also watch the recording here .   Image Source: Bart Fish & Power Tools of AI / https://betterimagesofai.org   / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   To get straight to the poi

On Thursday 21st August 2025 I was invited to give the plenary talk to open a debate about Generative-AI for qualitative research at the...

Qualitative data analysis is a varied field with numerous paradigms, methodologies, techniques and tools so it can be overwhelming to...

develop and analyse critical appraisals of literature thoughtfully and systematically

I focused on the digital tools. These are not the only options available, but they were specifically developed to support the analysis.

It's finally here - the ability to exchange analysed qualitative data between CAQDAS packages! Since September 2016 the developers of several CAQDAS packages have been working together to produce an open-source exchange standard, that we call the QDA-XML exchange format . Today the first version was released by the Rotterdam Exchange Exchange Format Initiative (REFI) - a big moment in the history of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, and something that will change

I was shocked and deeply saddened to see a tweet from Kandy Woodfield’s account announcing her passing. As Rob stated, she was a very...

On 17th October 2018 I had the privilege of opening the Digital Tools day at the World Conference on Qualitative Research (#WCQR2018) in Lisbon, Portugal. My talk was called “Mindsets for harnessing digital tools in qualitative and mixed-methods analysis: The Five-Level QDA method”. My main message was that we need to be more explicit about the way we think about the role of digital tools in the research process and our engagement with them. View the presentation slides on

Analytic strategies come before software tactics: that’s the Five-Level QDA approach . But there are times when software tactics can usefully inform analytic strategies. This leads to serendipitous exploration, and fits well with the emergent spirit of qualitative research. When analytic strategies drive software tactics the use of the software is meaningful – focused on the needs of the research rather than the capabilities of the program.  But many CAQDAS advocates say th

A key principle of the Five-Level QDA(R) method is that analytic strategies drive software tactics. This ensures that software use is...

Professor Debra Jackson’s post about the Journal of Child & Family Studies’ intention to from now on only review and publish quantitative...

This blog post is a response to Steve Wright’s reaction to this comment I made on Twitter on April 27th 2017: “There are no basic or advanced #CAQDAS features, but straightforward or more sophisticated uses of tools appropriate for different tasks” Thanks Steve for starting this conversation – it’s really important to debate these issues, and fun too! See Steve's comments here The sentiment behind the Twitter post underlies the Five-Level QDA® method that Nick Woolf and I h

In an earlier post on CAQDAS critics and advocates I promised to provide evidence for my position that CAQDAS packages are not distancing, de-contextualising, and homogenising, as is sometimes claimed. I have already argued that CAQDAS packages actually bring us closer to our data , and given an illustration of how this can happen , so here I consider the de-contextualising issue. I’m writing this because I saw a presentation slide on Twitter that listed a disadvantage of us

Last week I gave the keynote at the 1st International Symposium on Qualitative Research and the 5th Ibero-American Congress on...

I was searching through tweets using the #CAQDAS hashtag the other day and came across one that sent me reeling. And not in a good way. I’ve since been pondering why it prompted such a strong reaction, which might not have happened had I not been to the recent ICQI conference. The language of determinism and constructivism in CAQDAS discourses At the opening plenary of the Digital Tools stream at ICQI, Kristi Jackson, of Queri, Inc. highlighted that critics of CAQDAS often