How did Dedoose begin? Our 2023 YouTube Video Series is the ideal resource to gain some insight into how Dedoose was created and why.  

The below transcript is from a video discussion between co-founders Drs. Eli Lieber and Tom Weisner, as they recount the early years of QDAS and their drive to address challenges in developing Dedoose. Dr. Lieber’s early interests in developmental psychology and mixed methods research more broadly connected him with Dr. Weisner and lead to his position as co-director of the Fieldwork and Qualitative Data Research Laboratory in the UCLA Center for Culture and Health.

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Dr. Lieber: Hello, I am Dr. Eli Lieber, CEO of Dedoose. I am here with Dr. Tom Weisner, and in my role, I have recently been spending a lot of time talking to people on our team and thinking about the future of Dedoose.  

In doing so, I started to reflect a lot on the past. One thing that kept popping up to me was the EFI- and we will talk about that a little bit more- but that was one reason I invited Tom to come in and talk a little bit about that, and our history, and his central role within it. I refer to it in some of my notes as the “soul of Dedoose”, and you know where that all came from.  

Before I do that, though, I want to take you back a little bit further. It has been almost 25 years that Tom recruited me to UCLA where I have worked as a research psychologist. And you know- a lot happened before that to get me ready for what I have contributed to this journey together. First, I graduated at the University of Illinois a long time ago from the psychology department in a division called Personality and Social Ecology. Okay, it is an odd division! It was not even the division I applied to, as a fun fact, it does not exist anymore.  

But this allowed me to study and follow my interest in developmental psychology. Initially, I did some work with Carol Dweck, I did my master’s work with her. That was marvelous. Later, I did work with Jerry Clore, Ed Diener, and Mark Aber. This got my statistics chops going, and those measurements skills in my tool bag. Then I was off to Taiwan, where I studied culture and parenting with Heidi Fung. Under the guidance of a blessing of working with Yang Kuo-shu, I really became enamored with qualitative methods. I realized we needed to do the work we were doing with the same questions I was interested in, but with a different method. Then, I ended up at UCLA with Tom Weisner.  

This is when I was introduced to the EFI the eco-cultural family interview. This opened my eyes to ways we could integrate data that were gathered through both quantitative and qualitative methods. Both of which I value tremendously. This process started to answer our social science questions in new ways. So, I thought I would ask Tom to come in and just talk a little bit about where this thing came from because a lot happened in the EFI before I arrived. And it will help to bring these storylines together, and think about how this might serve the Dedoose future, as well. Tom, thank you.  

Dr. Weisner: It is great to be able to both talk about the history, and bring it up to contemporary concerns in research methods today. So, we had a mixed-method qualitative/quantitative research lab in our culture and Medicine Research Center at UCLA.  

At that time, when we were fortunate to get Eli to join us, he became the director and coordinator of the lab that we had within our Research Center, to do that kind of integration of mixed method data. We had several research projects at the time that were using quantitative measures, such as questionnaires, surveys, child assessments, parent interviews, and other material. We also had qualitative interviews, where we sat down and had a conversation with parents.  

Sometimes, we had conversations with teenagers, older kids, and community members about their concerns. The focus of this research at the time was parents that had kids with disabilities. One of the things that we focused on was the very clear importance of capturing both the assessments of how the kids were doing, and how the parents were responding to measures- and what their experience was. What their daily routine was like. What they were doing to accommodate, coordinate, and deal with all their kids including at least one of their kids that had disability.  

So, we tried in this work to combine statistical expertise and statistical significance from these various measures with significance drawn from interpretation. Understanding the interpretation was just as important, as Eli was just describing, as statistical significance and statistical patterns that you find in these families’ lives.  

The question then was, “Well, let us find the software and methods that will allow us to simultaneously put up on the screen, or in the paper, the quality of life, the experiences, the stories, the narratives, that the parents and kids were telling us; along with our quantitative information on how they were doing on a variety of scales." And we discovered there was no such software.

Dr. Weisner: So, we tried in this work to combine statistical expertise and statistical significance from these various measures with significance drawn from interpretation. Interpretive significance and understanding are just as important- as Eli was describing, as statistical significance and statistical patterns that you find in these families’ lives.  

The question then was, “Well, let’s go and find the software and methods that will allow us to simultaneously put up on the screen, or on the paper.”  

The quality of life, experiences, stories, narratives, parents, and kids were telling us, along with our quantitative information on how they were doing on various scales. There was no such software.  

Dr. Lieber: Can I interrupt just for a second Tom, because one of the things that is specific to the EFI that is a pivotal moment for me was the ratings. The ratings, as part of this. And so, you are describing you know, a lot of the stories and how it combines with other quantitative measures that were being applied in the same study, or related studies. But, built into the EFI- well, you are getting there…just gathering all the data we needed. OK, excuse me…  

Dr. Weisner: So, Eli is capturing the exact situation that we were in.  

(Laughter)  

Because on the one hand, we had the problem which we can summarize or crystalize as, “What does a ‘three’ mean? If a parent circles a three, on a seven-point scale, why did they circle that three? What does that mean?” And if you asked them why, they would tell you a story, or a narrative, about why they circled a three instead of a seven. The next parent will circle a three and give you a different story. A different interpretation of why they circled a three. So, we had to solve the “Why people circle a three” problem. So, to do that, you needed to take the quantitative data and provide and interpret a story, an account of that, on the qualitative side we had a similar problem. People told their stories and narratives, and there were themes, and topics, that came up again and again.  

“How do you deal with siblings? With therapists? With the medical community? What about your spouse or partner? What about schools? How do you finance the medical services that the child might need? What do you do about your relatives?”  

Many, many parents talked about religion. So, there were all these common themes cross cutting all the 102 families we had in the study, and that is where the scales and ratings came from. Because you could look across all the families.  

OK let us summarize what they said about siblings, and religion, and therapists. And we can make an interpretation, a judgement as to whether they were extremely satisfied or dissatisfied. Whether it was extremely helpful to them or not helpful to them.  

Whether there was a lot of hassle and trouble with the siblings, or whether there was extraordinarily little trouble. That is where the ratings came in.“So, on the one hand, we tried to answer the question of what a three means. On the other hand, we tried to summarize across many families, the narrative stories that they talked about related topics.”  That is where we wanted some tool that would help us to put all that information together and allow us to understand it.  

Dr. Lieber: Yes, that is it, that was the magic for me!  

Dr. Weisner: …that is where the ratings came from.

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