Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) About CAT

The Coding Analysis Toolkit: Beta Testers Sought

Currently over 300 beta testers have user accounts on CAT. They have been given free access to the system. We invite you to join the CAT beta test user group. Systematic user feedback was gathered via a beta tester web survey completed by 52 users in May 2008. The capabilities of CAT and its reliability as software may be sufficiently robust to merit commercial hosting starting in January of 2009. We have decided to make CAT an open source application under a GPL license, also in 2009.

The CAT system architecture requires a user to register for a primary account and to create sub-accounts for coders. Primary account holders (as well as "Expert" sub-account holders) can log on, upload and assign raw data for coding, or they can upload data coded and merged using ATLAS.ti and run comparisons of inter-rater reliability measured using Fleiss’ Kappa and Krippendorff's Alpha. The user can also choose to perform a code-by-code comparison of the data, revealing tables of quotations where coders agree, disagree, or (in the case of ATLAS.ti users) overlap their text span selections. CAT users can view the data reports on the screen, or alternatively, download the data file as a rich-text file (.rtf).

Download: sample raw data to code in CAT or prepare you own data
News: Watch a June 25, 2008 Screencast presentation on "New CAT Features"
Recent: QDAP Director announces CAT will be released as open source software under a GPL within one year.
Beta test: A new blog scraping tool (the Blog Analysis Toolkit) that creates archives of CAT-ready blog posts.

QDAP
"the smart way to code text"