Kristi Jackson founded QUERI, Inc. in 2002. QUERI is a qualitative research and consulting company that provides customized services in qualitative software coaching, qualitative research grant-writing, and qualitative project management. In her fifteen years as an evaluation researcher, she has served as Principal Investigator or co-investigator a diverse array of studies in public health, criminal justice, education, and community development. Her conference presentations and published papers often address the implications of the growing importance of qualitative data analysis software, and she is recognized as one of the leaders in this area. She is a principal organizer of the Technology in Qualitative Research day at the International Conference on Qualitative Inquiry. Her clients are entities as large as the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, and the Government Accountability Organization. They also include many small, non-governmental organizations in rural and urban settings.
NVivo is an efficient, flexible and powerful tool for managing qualitative data of all sorts (focus groups, field notes, interviews, case studies, content analyses, etc.).
Following the keynote presentation, two workshops were held:
Introductory Workshop to discuss the qualitative research process as well as the specific capabilities of the software. This hands-on workshop in a computer lab entailed the following:
- Creating a coding structure and coding documents
- Managing non-text data (audio, video, photographs, etc.)
- Keeping track of emerging thoughts, analytical notes and literature reviews within the project (primarily via memos and annotations)
- Triangulatating qualitative data with relevant quantitative variables (age, gender, ethnicity, GPA, Likert Scale responses, etc.)
- Conducting searches to reveal relationships among codes (and thereby build theories)
- Generating output in textual or numeric form (narrative reports, tables, charts, etc.)
- Developing models of your data and investigate the new “Relationship” tool (a combination of social network mapping AND qualitative coding software)
Intermediate Workshop to take specific projects and discuss design/analysis/reporting issues in conjunction with the NVivo software, which entailed:
- Participants providing a one-page summary of their projects (for the trainer and for other participants)
- Participants briefly explain the project, the current status, and any specific NVivo issues that are important to address with the project.
