The “Who’s Who” of Dedoose Users: How Our App Helps Researchers Across Disciplines and Industries Blog

Co-authored by Sara Grummert, Ph.D., and Kris Castner, M.A., M.A., A.B.D.

Dedoose Users Are as Unique as The Data They Work With

Whether your profession categorizes you within the academic community or outside of this sphere, there exist far more applications for Dedoose than University research alone.

Get ready to learn more about the types of industries, fields, and applications Dedoose is used in by professionals like yourself. For starters, Dedoose is used across academic disciplines to manage, analyze, and visualize a range of data for both journal articles and book projects.

FYI: If you are involved in academic research, don’t forget to tell your qualitative and mixed methods colleagues about our SAGE publication, “Data Analysis Using Dedoose”, which you can browse or purchase direct from the publisher on SAGE’s website.

Highlights: Academics Have Used Dedoose for Focus Groups, Videos and Visual Data, Semi-Structured Interviews, and More

Dr. Matt Rafalow used Dedoose to analyze data for his book entitled, “Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era.”

In the book, he specifies how the features in Dedoose helped him analyze data that spanned interviews, documents, and field notes:

“I used Dedoose, a mixed-methods coding application, to code sections of field notes, interview transcripts, and documents. Although obscured from my view while coding, each document was linked to a quantitative data point with sample characteristics (i.e., school name, class size, years of teaching, student race-ethnicity). This method allowed me to code freely for themes and afterward sort coded excerpts by these characteristics to clarify comparisons and identify disconfirming evidence.” – p. 177

Dr. Kirsten Hextrum also used Dedoose in her analysis for her new book, “Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes.” Dr. Hextrum shared with us how Dedoose was helpful in transitioning her dissertation data into several articles and the book!

Dedoose has been used to help researchers gain in-depth understandings into pressing issues and problems around the world. Dr. Karen E. Schifferdecker and colleagues used virtual focus groups to examine women’s experiences related to breast cancer screening and surveillance during the pandemic.

Their use of both Zoom and Dedoose to accomplish their study is an example of how COVID-19 has shifted research methods and how researchers may switch to online collaborative tools without losing methodological rigor.

In another instance, Dr. Richard McKenney and colleagues conducted a mixed-methods study about how COVID-19 is changing family therapy practices in the UK.

Dr. Melody Taba and colleagues recently used Dedoose in their research to understand how teens’ views about relationships are impacted by social media. Using a grounded theory approach, they analyzed 16 semi-structured interviews with Australian adolescents.

Dr. Ariana W. Katz and colleagues, researchers within the Women’s Global Health Imperative (WGHI), have used Dedoose in their research aimed at improving the health and wellness of women and girls around the world through studying HIV/AIDS prevention, addressing gender and economic inequity, and community-based interventions.

Researchers have also used the more complex features in Dedoose, such as coding directly on video data. Dr. Siduri Haslerig and colleagues used Dedoose to analyze over 120 hours of sport media video in their study “Invincible bodies: American Sport Media’s Racialization of Black and White College Football Players.”

Being able to code the video directly allowed for a more nuanced analysis of commentary, visuals, pre-produced segments, as well as the implications of contradictory and/or meaningful mismatches between commentary and the accompanying visuals.

Dedoose has also become a go-to answer for doctoral students analyzing their dissertation data. For an example, check out Dr. Rosalyn S. Barnes’ Twitter feed, where she recently shouted us out for helping her “dissertating” sessions!

Dr. Devin Graves used Dedoose to analyze data for his dissertation, a mixed methods study related to the racism in community college student’ financial aid experiences.

Dr. Efraín Martínez also used Dedoose for his dissertation, a qualitative study entitled, “Dispositions of Emotional Intelligence in School Principals.”

As you can see, no matter the type of data or size of your team, Dedoose can help maximize your analysis!

Dedoose in Non-Academic Research: Industries and Applications

What does Dedoose have to do with the Academy Awards, you ask? For starters, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is one prime example of a non-academic client we have successfully assisted in the past.

Indeed, the subject matter of your project is not what limits a project’s potential to benefit from Dedoose. Regardless of the nature of your surveys, videos, audio files, or other documents, features such as code co-occurrence charts, data plotting, and inter-rater reliability make Dedoose the perfect tool for professional researchers of all backgrounds.

AMPAS: “What contributes to decline in viewership and public perceptions of company culture?”: Dedoose and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

In order to investigate corporate culture and tap into changes in public perceptions, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked Sociocultural Research Associates LLC to analyze interviews with key constituencies.

Five groups of interviewees were identified: academy members and award winners, board members, creative partners, award-show partners, and AMPAS staff. Thanks to Dedoose, a scientifically rigorous process could be used to inform the decisions that needed to be made by AMPAS. As a result, rebranding efforts were updated and re-fashioned to reflect changing public attitudes to make future programming more inclusive with new talent and formatting.

SCARCLIFF SALVADOR: “How should we create an identity for a new off-strip luxury hotel in Las Vegas that resonates with prospective high-income guests?”

For this project, our team focused on analyzing surveys collected from wealthy visitors to Las Vegas. Participants were asked about which qualities, perks, and experiences they value in luxury hotel properties in order to answer the clients’ research question.

Using SurveyMonkey importation, we helped Scarcliff Salvador develop a coding system modeled around key topics of investigation. In this example, the ability to weight codes came proved to be extremely useful, as each was indexed to represent the individual importance of each item.

Once a wide variation by income level was detected, the team turned to the bubble plot feature in Dedoose to dig for additional data trends. As a result, four income-specific groups were identified, with summary composites eventually developed for each.

Why Do Researchers Choose Dedoose? We Provide the Support We Know You Need.

Simply put, Dedoose is a cloud-based data analysis tool created for researchers, by researchers. We take pride that each of our own team members represents a different audience among those that we serve daily.

We like to think that we do a lot of things right when it comes to helping researchers get more out of their data for less than the other guys. If you’ve tried everything Atlas.ti, NVivo or MaxQDA has to offer, why not try us out for a change?

;

BLOG