Qualitative data is by far the heart and soul of any business venture. But in its raw form, this data isn’t worth much. So how do you get to analyze huge chunks of qualitative data within a short time? Well, that’s where the best qualitative data analysis software comes in.
Qualitative data is typically generated through open-ended surveys, interview transcripts, texts and documents, and video recordings. Undoubtedly, qualitative data has more depth and is unstructured, making it different from quantitative data. Hold up! Do you understand what qualitative data analysis is?
What is Qualitative Data Analysis?
Qualitative data analysis is the art of structuring, interpreting, and gathering qualitative data to understand it better and what it represents. As I said earlier, qualitative data is unstructured and numerical. Meaning it’s challenging to decipher in its natural form.
However, businesses often use this data to interpret how customers value their products or services. More importantly, qualitative data is a rich source of data-driven decisions for any company. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, analyzing this data can be nerve-wracking.
That’s why the best qualitative data analysis software is now becoming the most sort after digital item. With this software, you can easily extract the relevant information from the raw data and use it to make profitable or future business decisions.
The Best Qualitative Data Analysis Software: Analysis Methods
There are currently several techniques that can be used to determine the specific objectives of the research. These analysis methods include:
· Content Analysis
Content analysis is a popular method of qualitative analysis. This technique makes it easy to identify patterns in content from the text and group them into themes, concepts, and words. Thematic analysis is the core of the content analysis. What’s more, content analysis helps identify relationships between grouped content data.
· Thematic analysis
This analysis technique aids in interpreting the message behind the words people use. The basic idea here is to discover repeating themes found in the text. The themes provide insights into the data that can be quantified. Generally, the information that’s derived in this technique is in code.
· Narrative analysis
This type of analysis leverages the stories people tell and the language they use to decipher the information. Narrative analysis is beneficial when understanding the customer’s point of view. More importantly, a narrative analysis makes it easy to summarize the outcome of a specific case study.
· Discourse analysis
Another type of analysis is discourse. This form is applicable when trying to understand cultural, power, and political dynamics in a specific situation.
The focus is on how the users express themselves in different social events. Brands commonly use this analysis technique to understand customers’ feelings about their products or service.
· Grounded analysis
The grounded technique is beneficial when there’s less information about the subjects. This analysis starts by formulating a theory around the single data. That means the theory or technique is grounded. However, this technique is based on actual data and is not speculative.
Top 4 Steps of Qualitative Data Analysis
For the best qualitative data analysis software to do its job, you’ll need to take care of a few things first. And we’ve broken them down into four simple steps, which include;
1. Conduct research
Before anything, you need to gather the data for analysis. Here, you can follow the classical way of gathering data, for instance, by conducting surveys and interviews. There are other data collection forms, but for this case, let’s stick with surveys and interviews. Or you can choose to use existing data from customer feedback.
2. Organize your Qualitative Data
Once you’ve gathered all the data, you now have to find the ideal way to organize it. Before your data can be analyzed, it needs to be organized in a single place. And why is that important? Consistency! When all the data is accessible at one point, you will have an easier time analyzing it and making informed decisions. An excellent way to organize your data is by using spreadsheets, feedback repositories, or CAQDAS.
3. Code Your Data
Once the data is organized, it’s time to code it. This step helps to extract meaningful insight from the content. But don’t be spooked by the term ‘coding.’ In fact, coding is simply a labeling technique that helps to organize your data further to identify the themes quickly. With this system, you can also find the relationship between different themes.
An excel sheet is quite common when coding your work, but there are other software you can utilize, for instance, CAQDAS, EnjoyHQ, IBM SPSS, and ASCRIBE. All these software will need a bit of getting used to so you can use them. However, if you want something fast and reliable without coding, Speak Ai is perfect. Speak Ai automates this process for you, and the results are more accurate than this manual process.
4. Analyze and Report Your Qualitative Data
This step tells a story of the data you’ve collected. This step involves creating a visual representation of your data to make it easy to understand. The process of getting insightful data from the code isn’t straightforward. It requires you to scour through the code and find meaningful correlations between the data.
After the code is fully developed, it’s time to communicate a narrative to your stakeholders. This report is typically in graphs and other visualization software appropriate for your qualitative data. Without the best qualitative analysis software, this process can be tedious. Ask anyone who does this manually, and they’ll confirm that it’s not as easy as taking a walk in the park.
The Best Qualitative Data Analysis Software
Business owners and other experts have leaned towards using manual methods for ages. That’s because automation software that could effectively analyze qualitative data still needed a little more research. However, that’s no longer the case. We now have a plethora of qualitative analysis software that can handle repetitive tasks.
However, we have two dominant software programs that rank up as the best qualitative data analysis software: NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Data Visualization. Both help with qualitative data analysis. But if you don’t know where to start, talk to Speak Ai.
Speak Ai is a company that specializes in providing software that makes your work and business experience seamless. That said, join +7,000 teams and individuals worldwide who rely solely on Speak Ai to analyze their qualitative data to gain valuable insights. Here’s your one-time chance to get a free trial or even book a demo to optimize your workflow. So, what are you waiting for?
