RQDA
- Last Updated: 4/2/2014 12:00:00 AM
- Site: http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/
RQDA is a free R package for qualitative analysis, developed specifically to analyze textual data. It is available for Windows, Linux/FreeBSD and Mac OS X. It currently requires texts to be in plain text format. RQDA supports non-English texts, and has been tested with Simplified Chinese in particular.
Documentation
Creator(s): Ronggui Huang, Fudan University
Creator's Site: http://homepage.fudan.edu.cn/rghuang/cv/
Creator's Email:
Repository:
Attributes
- Type of analysis: Natural Language Processing Analysis Content Analysis
- Type of license: Free
- Web Usable: Software you Download and Install
- Ease of Use: Moderate
- TaDiRAH Goals: Analysis
- TaDiRAH Methods: Content Analysis Other (analysis) Statistical Analysis
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I recently used RQDA for a small project where I read through around 600 news media articles. In the past I had used costly programs like Nvivo, so getting used to RQDA's interface was a bit of a change. However, the program is quite straightforward to use and you can watch some useful tutorials on youtube, or by following this link: http://tinyurl.com/nxa5c8x
While RQDA is not as feature rich as paid programs like Nvivo it will do the trick for organizing textual extracts by themes and subthemes. You may want to try a number of different approaches to importing your text as well. I started with a large pdf and tried to import the text, but there were erroneous sybols, tabs, and other formatting issues. Rather than work to fix these I just analyzed my texts with the mess that I imported. In all, RQDA is a useful tool and I will likely use it again in the future. I also expect that with repeated exposure to the program I will find it more useful and easier to work with.