Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) About CAT

The Coding Analysis Toolkit: Validation/Adjudication Module

CAT’s core functionality allows for the adjudication of coded items by an “expert” user (or users). This review is managed by a primary account holder, or a sub-account holder attached to the primary account holder. An expert user (or a consensus adjudication team) can log onto the system to validate the codes assigned to items in a dataset. As with the coding module, items present automatically in the viewer. The adjudicator sees the passage of text, the code to be adjudicated, and the other codes assigned by the respective coders. Keystrokes are used to 'score' the observation valid (1) or invalid (3).

While the expert user is validating the coding, the system keeps track of which instances of a particular code are valid and which coders assigned those codes. This information provides a track record of coders for assessing coder validity over time, in one project or over many projects. It also allows the account holder to see a rank order list of the coders most likely to produce valid observations, report the overall validity scores by code, coder, or entire project, and end up with a ‘clean’ coded dataset consisting of only valid observations. The website and database itself resides on a Windows 2003 UCSUR server in FISMA-compliant room and the programming for the website is done using HTML, ASP.net 2.0 and JavaScript.

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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.

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