Researchware, Inc.

In a paper entitled "Bridging the Divide Between Methods and Technology: Linking up Software to Qualitative Methods Instruction" presented by Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Jeannette Belcher-Schepis, and Xiaoxia Chen at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held at the Montreal Convention Center on August 11, 2006, the authors discuss

"the results of an exploratory study of interviews and focus groups with graduate students who have engaged in or are currently engaging in qualitative methods learning, instruction, or research projects. In addition, we also present data from a case-study example highlighting the experiences of students who attended a five-week instructional workshop on integrating qualitative data analysis software into qualitative research. We track individual student's workshop experiences through the evaluation of students’ memos about their learning of computer software. We specifically focus on issues dealing with the timing of students’ introduction to the software, the proper approaches to teaching, the curricula development, and ultimately, how to best assist students in acquiring the knowledge, skills and attitudes that would result in the successful integration of qualitative data analysis software into their understanding of the qualitative research process." HyperRESEARCH was used as the computer software tool for qualitative analysis for this project. The abstract of this paper can be found online here and the full paper by clicking here.