In the spotlight - qualitative data exchange schema

Article dated: 3 January 2008

The UK Data Archive has been working on an Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard to represent complex qualitative and mixed method data collections. This work is being supported under the Data Exchange Tools (DExT) project funded by the JISC Repositories Programme.

DExT aims to develop open source utilities for the conversion of both quantitative and qualitative data into a standard archiving format and export to common analysis data software packages or database systems. The initial phase is a proof of concept focusing on:

• using SPSS as an input format
• supporting export to SPSS, Stata, SAS and ASCII
• converting Atlas-ti and QDA Miner, both commonly used Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) packages, to an intermediate format

This work will lay the foundation for more advanced tools that can support additional input and output formats and provide enhanced functionalities.

The schema for qualitative and mixed methods collections, named QuDEx, represents the lowest common denominator for exchange between CAQDAS softwares.

CAQDAS packages were developed in the late 1980s, typically by keen qualitative researchers, and the resulting software thus embodies different methodological and analytical approaches. The past decade has seen a huge take up of the use of these packages in research and in teaching, and in the UK the CAQDAS Networking Group has provided an invaluable information portal, forum and outreach programme to help users get started. While a basic set of functions can be seen across the software, various new functions have been added to some packages and not others. Thus each has its own flavour, and also terminology. The core functions in CAQDAS packages are:

• coding
• classifying
• memoing
• search and retrieval

Whole project and file handling/documentation for collections is being managed in sister schema currently being drafted using the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). National and international XML schema experts - the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) - have been drawn in to help push the schemas forward.

Key reports and presentations from the DExT project can be found on the DExT web site.