Full Qualitative and Mixed Methods Support

From the ground up, Dedoose was always designed to support researchers, evaluators, and their teams looking to incorporated qualitative and mixed methods approaches in their working with text, audio, video, images, and survey and test data. We recognized from our own work and what we learned from others that many people needed multiple software programs to accomplish the things they were trying to do in their work. When you look to move beyond traditional software and whatever other tools were out there, you crave solutions that increase efficiency. And, when you do your work with others an entirely new set of challenges exist. Enter Dedoose, the natively collaborative environment that is ready to support your:

• Traditional qualitative data management, excerpting/coding, and analysis
• Easy integration of the qualitative data and all you’ve done with them with demographics, survey, test score, and other quantitative data
• Introducing new dimensions to your project data using code weighting for truly mixed methods analysis with all the awesome data visualization that come along with this variety of data in a project.

Web-Based

Living in the ‘cloud’ gives Dedoose endless advantages over traditional software, including:

• Accessibility - open your Dedoose projects from any Internet connected computer via a browser or our desktop app
  • Any computer, anywhere, anytime
  • No software to install (unless you want to use the desktop app, and it’s an itty bitty thing)
  • Nothing to maintain
  • Nothing to patch/update
  • Research and Evaluation Data App (REDA), so Dedoose is ALWAYS up-to-date—once we push up anything new or improved and it is yours in an instant…. just log in!
• Collaborative
  • Work with any number of teammates in real time
  • Strengthen your work by teaming with others who bring alternative perspectives and experiences
  • Easily work across old school disciplinary boundaries
  • Control team member access privileges as needed
• Cost
  • Did we mention ‘nothing to purchase?’ Low subscription fees are all you need to pay to have all of Dedoose at your fingertips.
  • Back in the day when we started building Dedoose we knew countless researchers who were abandoning traditional qualitative analysis software due to cost, over complexity, and inability to support teams
  • We all know cost matters, so with Dedoose, this all adds up to ‘Extremely AFFORDABLE’—How much do you spend on coffee each month?...hmmm. Being web-based let’s us offer it all to you for low low fees and we’ll be doing all we can to keep in that way.

Intuitive

Tools are only useful when they are accessible and sensible. We’re active academic researchers and evaluators, so we know, as well as anyone, what most people are doing with their qualitative and mixed methods technology. Yeah, there are times you will need complex filtering and other features and we’ve got them dialed into Dedoose so they are there when appropriate. BUT, what most people are doing most of the time should be straightforward and many people who work on teams the basics of building a project are the only thing they will be doing. This simple idea has never escaped us and so we have laser focus on making sure the learning curve is as shallow as possible. Yes, we are ‘shallow,’ so you can get yourself and your team up-to-speed as fast as possible.

Interactive Visualizations and Analytics

Dedoose delivers a full set of interactive charts, tables, and plots to:

• Capitalize on the fully integrated qualitative/quantitative data continuum in powerful and informative analysis activities
• Discover and explore surface patterns not easily seen otherwise
• Access the underlying rich qualitative data by clicking through
• Export directly to your local machine to drop into presentations and manuscripts

Media Support

Again, it’s all about mixed methods, so, yes, Dedoose is ready for you to import all types of media into a project for qualitative and quantitative data integration and analysis including:

• Documents—be they Word, text, pdf, htm, or html type files, Dedoose supports them all and your data can be in ANY LANGUAGE (we’ve even features for right-to-left languages)
• Images? SURE, bring those jpgs, gifs, and all their image buddies
• Audio/Video—Dedoose has specialized workspaces and features for excerpting, coding, linking to transcriptions and everything else you’d want to do with your streaming files
• Spreadsheets—straight into the Descriptors Workspace and if you’ve both open and closed ended data in a xls, xlsx, or csv file, our importer unpacks the data and does some huge time saving linking automatically

Open Import/Export Migration

Dedoose allows full importing and full exporting of all your data. Unlike some, we will never try to lock you into Dedoose. Also, beyond the survey importing wizard described in the spreadsheet media import, Dedoose is ready to receive your projects who may have lived in NVivo, Atlas.ti, MaxQDA, Saturate, HyperResearch, Quirkos, and others. Just check into our support materials or with our support team and we’ll be delighted to see you loving your data in the Dedoose environment and all AT NO COST.

Constant Evolution and Pioneering Technology

Dedoose has historically remained at the cutting edge of web-based technologies. The possibilities for what takes place in the cloud are expanding rapidly and our development team tracks this growth closely so we can be sure to bring you the best of everything. We like to push boundaries and its awesome to see how fast the boundaries are moving. As they do, we are able to evolve and build in new features and functionality along with our constant efforts to assure maximum performance.

Secure and Integrated

Yes, of course, we work in universities too, so fully appreciate the need for top rate data security and privacy protection. If we didn’t do this well no one could use Dedoose. You can learn all about the details in our terms of service, but all you need to do is consider our use of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol SECURE (HTTPS)—like when online banking, Transport Layer Security (TLS), customizable Dedoose project-specific encryption, FedRAMP Moderate, AWS GovCloud, Private Deployments, HIPAA compliance, SAML / OAuth2 support for enterprise clients, and more.

Real Science

• Three ways to build out inter-rater reliability across your team—if you are doing good work and you can communicate clearly about what you’ve done, the people who are going to listen and care want to know it and, if you can convince them, they’ll have much more confidence in what you delivered. One way to approach this is to show them by demonstrating the consistency and shared understanding among your colleagues and team members via:
  • Coding blind—independently excerpt and tag content and then get a clear look at how different members of your team agree and disagree
  • Document cloning—to focus more on how just the coding decisions are made
  • The Dedoose Training Center—to formally test agreement in coding and code weight/rating decisions with results that include Cohen’s Kappa and Pearson’ correlation coefficient
• Code Weight/Rating system that allows you to overlay a numerical dimension onto your commonly coded qualitative data. This feature allows for truly mixed methods implementation by indexing content across dimensions that can represent quality, importance, sentiment, value, … anything you can represent on a numerical scale. And, when you can, these scales can open a world of powerful and informative analytic possibilities
• Memo System to document decision points, milestones, and analytic reminders to help assure transparency in all data interaction and interpretation

Support and Nurturance

It is in our DNA to be extremely supportive. We’re educators, right? Yes, of course we want people to use Dedoose, but we also want them to use it well! This all really matters to us because if people use Dedoose well, their work will have high quality, they’ll be happy, their work will have positive impacts and, if they are happy with Dedoose, the value they offer in sharing their Dedoose stories is gold to us. How do we deliver?

• Phone and email access to our outstanding, patient, friendly, and knowledgeable support team for most of your needs
• One-on-one training and support when your needs go beyond the typical
• 24/7/365 web-based access to our extensive tutorials, user guide, and other digital supports
• Access to our network of expert and professional academic researchers who are masterful with Dedoose and outstanding methodologists when your training and other support needs rise to the exceptional.