WebQDA: Software de Apoio à Análise Qualitativa

Francislê Neri Souza
Universidade de Aveiro
Portugal

António Pedro Costa
Universidade de Aveiro
Portugal

António Moreira
Universidade de Aveiro
Portugal

Abstract:
The present text is a proposal for the development of qualitative data analysis software in a collaborative distributed environment (WebQDA). In spite of the fact that there are some applications that deal with non-numeric and unstructured data (texts, multimedia), none of them can be used by several researchers in a collaborative distributed environment as the Internet can offer. The development of WebQDA will therefore follow the international trend of free Internet access social software such as google docs or wikis. WebQDA will be especially useful for researchers, both in academic and business contexts, who require synchronous or asynchronous analysis of qualitative data in collaboration with other partners, or even in any computer with web access. This application will follow the structural and theoretical design of the most used proprietary software – NVivo, Atlas.ti, MaxQDA –, with the main difference that it will offer the ability to work collaboratively online in real time along with a research support service.