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The Soul of Dedoose: A Blended History of the Ecocultural Family Interview (EFI) and Dedoose, Part I of VI

2/28/2023

Video Featuring Dr. Eli Lieber and Dr. Tom Weisner

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Written By Kris Castner, M.A., M.A., A.B.D.

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Dedoose History 101: Episode One

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“The Early Years: Tom and Eli Discuss EFI, UCLA, and Initial Challenges”

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“How did Dedoose begin?” If you have ever found yourself asking this question, our 2023 YouTube Video Series is the perfect resource.

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This month’s blog features video one of six where co-founders Dr. Eli Lieber and Dr. Tom Weisner discuss the early years of their journeys, and how they merged through Dedoose the app.

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You will discover how Dr. Lieber’s initial curiosity for Developmental Psychology and mixed methods helped to connect him with Dr. Weisner, and how this association resulted in Eli’s eventual positioning within UCLA’s Medicine Research Center.

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Dedoose and EFI History Ft. Dr. Tom Weisner and Dr. Eli Lieber

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

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 EL: Hello, I am Dr. Eli Lieber, CEO of Dedoose. I am here with Dr. Tom Weisner, and in my role, I have recently been spending a lot of time talking to people on our team and thinking about the future of Dedoose.

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EL: In doing so, I started to reflect a lot on the past. One thing that kept popping up to me was the EFI- and we will talk about that a little bit more- but that was one reason I invited Tom to come in and talk a little bit about that, and our history, and his central role within it. I refer to it in some of my notes as the “soul of Dedoose”, and you know where that all came from.

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EL: Before I do that, though, I want to take you back a little bit further. It has been almost 25 years that Tom recruited me to UCLA where I have worked as a research psychologist. And you know- a lot happened before that to get me ready for what I have contributed to this journey together.

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EL: First, I graduated at the University of Illinois a long time ago from the psychology department in a division called Personality and Social Ecology. Okay, it is an odd division! It was not even the division I applied to, as a fun fact, it does not exist anymore.

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EL: But this allowed me to study and follow my interest in developmental psychology. Initially, I did some work with Carol Dweck, I did my master’s work with her. That was marvelous.

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EL: Later, I did work with Jerry Clore, Ed Diener, and Mark Aber. This got my statistics chops going, and those measurements skills in my tool bag. Then I was off to Taiwan, where I studied culture and parenting with Heidi Fung.

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EL: Under the guidance of a blessing of working with Yang Kuo-shu, I really became enamored with qualitative methods. I realized we needed to do the work we were doing with the same questions I was interested in, but with a different method. Then, I ended up at UCLA with Tom Weisner.

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EL: This is when I was introduced to the EFI the eco-cultural family interview. This opened my eyes to ways we could integrate data that were gathered through both quantitative and qualitative methods. Both of which I value tremendously. This process started to answer our social science questions in new ways.

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EL: So, I thought I would ask Tom to come in and just talk a little bit about where this thing came from because a lot happened in the EFI before I arrived. And it will help to bring these storylines together, and think about how this might serve the Dedoose future, as well. Tom, thank you.

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TW: It is great to be able to both talk about the history, and bring it up to contemporary concerns in research methods today. So, we had a mixed-method qualitative/quantitative research lab in our culture and Medicine Research Center at UCLA.

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TW: At that time, when we were fortunate to get Eli to join us, he became the director and coordinator of the lab that we had within our Research Center, to do that kind of integration of mixed method data. We had several research projects at the time that were using quantitative measures, such as questionnaires, surveys, child assessments, parent interviews, and other material. We also had qualitative interviews, where we sat down and had a conversation with parents.

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TW: Sometimes, we had conversations with teenagers, older kids, and community members about their concerns. The focus of this research at the time was parents that had kids with disabilities. One of the things that we focused on was the very clear importance of capturing both the assessments of how the kids were doing, and how the parents were responding to measures- and what their experience was. What their daily routine was like. What they were doing to accommodate, coordinate, and deal with all their kids including at least one of their kids that had disability.

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TW: So, we tried in this work to combine statistical expertise and statistical significance from these various measures with significance drawn from interpretation. Understanding the interpretation was just as important, as Eli was just describing, as statistical significance and statistical patterns that you find in these families’ lives.

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TW: The question then was, “Well, let us find the software and methods that will allow us to simultaneously put up on the screen, or in the paper, the quality of life, the experiences, the stories, the narratives, that the parents and kids were telling us; along with our quantitative information on how they were doing on a variety of scales. And we discovered there was no such software…”

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TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT MONTH’S (VIDEO) BLOG…

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Can’t Wait Until Next Month? Re-Read Dr. Weisner’s 2022 Reflections.

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Access more in-depth information now regarding the “early days” of Dedoose by reading Dr. Tom Weisner’s beginning of year address from about this time last year.

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Dr. Weisner reflects more extensively in this blog upon his three decades at Dedoose as a company, including its early iteration as EthnoNotes.

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You also learn the backstory of how Tom and Eli met the third Dedoose co-founder, Jason Taylor, who supplied the needed technical expertise to upgrade EthnoNotes to the Dedoose we use and love today.

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Looking for More Dedoose Videos? Visit Our YouTube Channel.

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We are constantly refreshing our video offerings on the official Dedoose Support YouTube channel.

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Even though our older Dedoose videos have not yet been re-recorded using our newest interface, the basics are still helpful for most functions in Dedoose.

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In the meantime, we are working on our inventory and publishing new content every chance we get!

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We highly recommend the following Dedoose YouTube videos to help you get started:

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Interested in having us feature your own Dedoose 101 tutorial on our social media channels? Simply tag us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube.

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