About this Software

Large-scale qualitative research projects in the social sciences and humanities have largely been facilitated and driven in recent decades by the availability of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (QDA) tools. NVivo, ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA are generally recognized as leaders in this field. However, efforts to use the most recent versions of these tools have presented some significant challenges:

• difficulties with backwards compatibility;
• encouraging research data management practices that are out of step with the ones demanded by Canadian universities ethics committees;
• a shift towards quantitative functions that bear little relationship to the fundamental premises of qualitative research;
• licensing costs that make it difficult for non-university actors to participate in analyses.

These issues are particularly challenging in certain uses cases, especially for teaching qualitative methods, undertaking interdisciplinary and collaborative research, ensuring that qualitative projects are completed ethically and responsibly, and creating links between the university and practice fields.

Although these issues are well known, universities continue to buy licenses for these software packages to ensure access for their members. The decision by universities to support proprietary QDA software is understandable, since the non-proprietary options that currently exist aren’t able to match either the performance or ease-of-use found in commercial software. While the few open-source applications that have been developed in recent years have considerable potential, they lack the institutional support needed for long-term usability.

Being conscious of these challenges and, most importantly, the needs that exist in the field of qualitative research, the team at the Plateforme en humanités numériques and its partners have proposed LibreQDA as a solution. The use of the term “solution” is intended to signal a holistic approach that combines a digital tool (the software) with research support services. Thanks to a special grant from the Vice-rectorat à la recherche et aux études spérieures at Université de Sherbrooke and the open-source code from the Taguette research tool (a text-tagging tool already used by tens of thousands of people), our team has recently completed the first phase in LibreQDA’s development.

This first version of the software has been tested by a dozen research teams and adds crucial functions to Taguette that are essential to qualitative analyses.