QualCoder

Audio and video files can be imported into QualCoder in the following formats: wav, mp3, mov, mp4, ogg, wmv.

You do need to have the vlc media player installed. See their site for details: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Or you can download through the Windows Store. Alternatively, on linux you can add vlc using the terminal (or run the install script):

sudo apt install vlc qtwayland5

Audio and video segments can be coded. Currently, the only way to obtain reports on coded segments or delete coded segments is through the sql_dialog window. Further work will be implemented to improve these functions.

The audio or video is shown in its own dialog window and the controls, codes and transcript is shown in a separate dialog, as illustrated below.

Testing of the various functionalities of QualCoder has been performed on Windows 10. Several minor issues were identified and resolved. Functionality appears to be error free.

One quirk is with exporting reports using ODT file format (this is the default format for LibreOffice) and then opening the ODT document with Microsoft Word rather than LibreOffice. If the report contains multiple images, the images in the document when opened using Word overlap. This can be fixed  within the opened document by moving the images around. Below is an example of overlapping images in ODT format opened with Word:

It was recommended that I make a user manual. So I have spent some time and written a QualCoder User Manual in PDF format. The manual is in English. This can be found on the github site: https://github.com/ccbogel/QualCoder

In the coding reports a case matrix is now available. Select your codes and categories and cases as normal. The run the Search.

The output will show the codings on the left and on the right a case matrix table is shown. The matrix shows each case as a row and each top-level category (or theme) as a column. Each cell in the matrix show the coded text and images.

The code selection tree may be hidden on the left-hand side of the window, you can drag this across with the mouse. Similarly, you can drag the matrix to fill the screen.

I have made some improvements to the coding reports section. Reports now show coded image sections. Text and image codings can be exported to open document ODT format and to html format.

QualCoder is software that helps with qualitative data analysis.With QualCoder you can code text, images and video, write journal notes and memos. Categorise codes into a hierarchical categorisation scheme (similar to Nvivo). Reports can be generated for text coding and for coder comparison with the Cohen’s Kappa statistic. A graph displaying codes and categories can be generated to visualise the coding hierarchy.

QualCoder files have been uploaded to github: https://github.com/ccbogel/QualCoder

QualCoder has been written in python3 and pyqt5. It has been tested on Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but not on Windows so far.

It was developed out of PyQDA which in turn was inspired by RQDA. However, QualCoder has a different database structure and is not directly compatible with PyQDA or RQDA.

I hope it generates some interest and that people can use it for their needs and give me feedback to improve QualCoder.