What I find particularly exciting about RQDA is that it lets you use the powerful machinery of R. It allows you to import text files (in many languages), code them using a graphical interface, and store your codes (and their meta-information) in a usable format. The package is still in development (current version 0.3-1) and some bugs are apparent. RQDA was designed by Ronggui Huang from Fudan University, Shanghai, and has been used in a number of publications. I took a look at RQDA, a free, light, and open-source CAQDAS built on top of R. These functions do not have to be necessarily bundled with QDA programs. The rest – extracting content from PDF files, combining codes, visualizing them, etc. Think of a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) as a super highlighter (your brain is still doing the hard stuff). The essence of qualitative data analysis (QDA) is to annotate text using relevant codes. Also, I simply did not need all the bells and whistles offered by these tools (I suspect I am not the only one in this situation). Yet, these programs are expensive and not everyone is able to afford a license. In social sciences, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and NVivo are the most commonly used programs to analyze qualitative data. I was looking for a tool to work with the data collected. Extracting this type of information automatically is difficult and I opted to code some of the material manually. I was particularly interested in the prior political experience of the AfD representatives. The idea was to automatically download the MPs’ profiles from the Bundestag website using web scraping techniques and then to describe the social structure of the AfD faction using quantitative and qualitative methods. Coding CVs of members of the Bundestag using RQDAĪt the WZB, as part of a project on the AfD (the new radical right party in Germany), I recently had to analyze CVs of Members of the Bundestag.
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