Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) Testimonials

Testimonials from Past and Current QDAP Clients

PI: Ashok J. Bharucha, MD
Project Name: Nursing Home Aggression: Automated Video Monitoring Project
Home Page: www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu (follow CareMedia link)
Project Description: Automated Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care is a project that required highly motivated, detail oriented human observers who were willing to code what is now the world’s largest video-based dataset from a clinical/residential setting, amounting to 14,000 camera-hours of data.
Testimonial: QDAP organized and facilitated this highly complex process of data coding by recruiting raters who were intelligent, nuanced and enthusiastic, and developing an elaborate coding manual that made this innovative task manageable. With their assistance, we have now developed the largest labeled video dataset that will be at the disposal of clinical and computer vision researchers who are interested in automating the identification of persons and their activities, behaviors and social interactions. The infrastructure that we developed with QDAP has been indispensable for our progress.

PI: Paul A. Pilkonis, PhD
Project Name: PROMIS: Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System
Home Page: http://www.nihpromis.org
Project Description: PROMIS is an NIH Roadmap initiative involving seven universities. The main goal of this research is to develop and test a large bank of items measuring patient-reported outcomes in the areas of emotional distress, pain, fatigue, physical functioning, and social role participation. Our first step is to utilize qualitative data from focus groups and cognitive interviewing to assess the acceptability and comprehensiveness of our item banks.
Testimonial: QDAP has been instrumental in transcribing, coding, and analyzing our qualitative data from focus groups. Our project required ingenuity and flexibility in developing coding systems for multiple constructs. QDAP was able to deliver successfully on all counts.

PI: Eric T. Meyer, PhD
Project Name: Socio-Technical Perspectives on Digital Photography: Scientific Digital Photography Use by Marine Mammal Researchers.
Home Page: http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/meyer/
Project Description: This study examined how marine biologists who rely on photographic evidence to identify individual marine mammals have seen significant changes in their everyday work practices as they switched from film photography to digital photography.
Testimonial: I used QDAP to transcribe a number of interviews that I needed done in short order when I was at Indiana University. QDAP delivered the finished transcripts quite quickly, and were instrumental in allowing me to finish the project by the deadline. I can recommend their team for researchers needing transcribing done in a professional manner at very competitive rates.

PI: Michael J. Higgins, PhD
Project Name: Sr. Margaret Carney, OSF: The First Fulltime Woman President of Saint Bonaventure University; A Case Study Of Franciscan Leadership In Higher Education
Project Description: The dissertation employed a case study methodology to analyze the leadership style of Sr. Margaret Carney, OSF, who was hired as the first fulltime woman president of Saint Bonaventure University in 2004 - during a time when the institution was dealing with the effects of a debilitating scandal. The data for the study emerged from an examination of relevant documents at the University, a review of media accounts, and an in-depth analysis of interviews that were conducted with Carney and eight of her colleagues in May of 2006, two years after she assumed the presidency.
Testimonial: Case study methodology allows a researcher to bring a case to life in a way that is not possible using the statistical methods of quantitative research. However, it also runs the risk of being highly subjective and its results can easily be colored or distorted by researcher bias. There are a number of strategies that can be employed to guarantee that the research deals with these weaknesses and insures an adequate level of construct validity, internal validity, external validity and reliability. These include: triangulation, member checking, thick descriptions, bias clarification, presentation of negative or contrary data, prolonged time in the field, peer debriefing, contextual completeness, code checking, and the use of an external auditor. The methodology that the QDAP group used to analyze and code the interviews for this study strengthened the dissertation tremendously. Its inclusion helped allay any fears that the study was undermined by any conscious or unconscious researcher bias.

PIs: Daqing He and Peter Brusilovsky
Project Name: Rosetta: An Analyst' Co-Pilot
Project Description: With electronic communications becoming increasingly pervasive over the globe, coupled with expanding asymmetric threats, digesting the large flood of communications in unforeseen languages poses a challenge. Rosetta system we plan to develop with our partners will be an innovative system that tightly couples speech transcription, language translation, and adaptive, multi-source information distillation in ways that permit English-speaking analysts to focus on and understand the most important information in their area of expertise.
Testimonial: Dr. Shulman and his team have been a wonderful collaborator in developing a test collection of working scenarios and related documents for designing, developing, and evaluating the collaborative, adaptive information filtering engine used in our project.

PI: Claudia Edwards
Project Name: Building Civic Capacity: A Strategy for Improving Public Education in Communities with High Concentrations of Minority Students
Project Description: The purpose of this study is to understand to what extent the political environment in the City of Mount Vernon is or is not conducive to building its civic capacity as a means to develop a community vision for its local schools. Through the method of qualitative research, this study examines the public to measure the potential for building the political capacity of citizens as a means to improve its public schools. It draws from the Clarence Stone Theory of Civic Capacity as a means to reform public education in communities with high concentrations of minority and poor students.
Testimonial: My work with Dr. Shulman and his team has served as a valuable resource in helping with the management of audio transcriptions for more than 100 in-depth interviews and several focus group discussions. Audio files were transcribed in a timely and professional manner. In addition the security systems QDAP has in place to protect the confidentiality and safekeeping of our data, enabled our researchers to operate at a high comfort level and focus our full attention on the analytical aspects of the project. It was a wonderful experience and a testimony to what true collaboration can achieve.

PI: Jamie Callan
Home Page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~callan/
Project Name: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking
Project Home Page: http://erulemaking.cs.cmu.edu/
Project Description: Federal Regulatory agencies frequently receive large numbers of form letter (duplicate) and modified form letter (near-duplicate) responses in Notice and Comment Rulemaking. This project develops software that identifies form letters, modified form letters, and the unique passages in modified form letters, and that organizes it for convenient browsing.
Testimonial: Prior to QDAP there were no standard datasets for evaluating this type of research, and no published figures about human accuracy or inter-coder agreement on this type of problem. QDAP produced benchmark figures on human speed and accuracy, and helped to create several high-quality, reusable datasets that are now available to a wider research community. QDAP coding was instrumental to obtaining a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of our software solutions, and how they compare to the performance of well-trained human coders.

PI: Kya Conner
Project Name: Mental Health Treatment Seeking Among Older Adults with Depression: The Impact of Stigma and Race
Project Description: This dissertation study involves interviews with 20 older African Americans with depression to assess their attitudes about seeking mental health treatment.
Testimonial: The QDAP program has done an excellent job in accurately and time effectively transcribing my qualitative interviews. QDAP has been very accommodating and has worked closely with me to make my dissertation a success. I greatly appreciate them for all of their hard work.

PI: Rebekah Hamilton, PhD RN
Project Name: Decision Making in Young Women at Risk for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC)
Project Description: The purpose of this study is to increase our understanding of the health behavior decision making of young women who discover they are at high risk for HBOC. This study will describe how receiving genetic risk information affects decisions about actual health behaviors. The specific aims of the study are to: 1) To describe patterns of decision making about health behaviors in women <35 years in response to a positive or ambiguous genetic test result; and 2) To describe influences associated with health behavior decision making that are most salient to young women at risk for HBOC.
Testimonial: Qualitative studies are time intensive projects especially when the number of participants is greater than 35-40. As a PI on a 70+ participant grounded theory study having the opportunity to employ experienced and supervised coders to assist with data analysis is very helpful. The output from QDAP allows for a well documented process and statistics that reflect current psychometric standards of data reporting. The process of qualitative data analysis is enhanced and time is maximized by working with the QDAP team.

PI: Dr. Charli Carpenter, PhD
PI Home Page: http://www.pitt.edu/~charli/
Project Name: Constructing 'Children and Armed Conflict' (CaAC) in Transnational Society
Home Page: http://www.pitt.edu/~charli/an.htm
Project Description: This research project tests hypotheses about the emergence or non-emergence of advocacy around specific issues in world politics. I am interested in why transnational advocacy networks (TANs) in the human security area have mobilized around some issues (such as HIV-AIDS, landmines, child soldiers, and violence against women) but not others (such as infant male circumcision, forced conscription, stigma against children born of wartime rape). The project currently involves coding text data from focus groups with humanitarian practitioners to explore hypotheses about why certain issues are not "adopted" by advocacy organizations.
Testimonial: Assistance from QDAP has dramatically streamlined the process of developing, testing, refining and applying a fairly complicated coding scheme. I highly recommend this service to anyone who cares about rigor in qualitative coding but has limited time and/or is not an expert in ATLAS.ti.

PI: Ronald B. Mitchell, PhD
PIs Home Page: http://www.uoregon.edu/~rmitchel/
Project Name: International Environmental Agreements Database
Project Home Page: http://iea.uoregon.edu/
Project Description: The International Environmental Agreements Database (IEA Database) project, initiated in 2002, is developing a systematic and comprehensive catalog of all historic and current IEAs (currently including over 800 multilateral IEAs and over 1500 bilateral IEAs). The project seeks to identify the population of IEAs, provide summary information on the agreements and links to their electronic texts, code the agreement texts to identify systematic types of variation in agreement provisions, and provide access to datasets of performance indicators specific to as many IEAs as possible that can be used to evaluate the effects of these agreements on human behavior and environmental quality.
Testimonial: Working with QDAP has been invaluable in helping us develop and test our strategies for converting hundreds of IEA texts into a systematic database that codes IEAs in terms of variation in their provisions. QDAP's Director provided unparalleled support in thinking through the problems of coding qualitative text in a systematic way, contributing theoretical insights about overall structure and substantive context while also bringing a wealth of experience that allows him to provide practical suggestions for how to overcome the numerous obstacles one faces in coding qualitative data. QDAP has helped this project's development immensely.

PI: Randy S. Hebert, MD MPH
Project Name: Preparing Caregivers for the Death of a Loved One Project
Project Description: Studies show that family caregivers who are unprepared for the death of their loved one suffer more psychiatric morbidity. The PI interviewed family caregivers in order to determine the questions and concerns they have while providing care to a terminally ill family member and to determine how best to prepare families for the death. The goals of this project are to develop an intervention to better prepare caregivers for the death of their loved one.
Testimonial: Working with QDAP has been a pleasure. Their services cut the time necessary for my data analysis down by several months. The staff were also diligent in working with me and responding to my questions.

PI: Eduard Hovy
Home Page: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/hovy.html
Project Name: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking
Project Home Page: http://erulemaking.ucsur.pitt.edu/
Project Description: The ISI portion of the eRulemaking project focuses on automated in-depth analysis of large numbers of text written to the government by citizens and experts in response to proposed government regulations. Since the authors cover a range of levels of expertise, have great differences of writing sophistication and style, express a variety of opinions, and hail from a diversity of backgrounds, we needed human annotation of the data in order to obtain enough material for our automated systems to be trained. We have requested annotations of opinion, basic discourse structure, and subtopics, according to a variety of criteria.
Testimonial: I have worked with other annotation groups before, and run a fairly large annotation operation in another project, so I know first-hand the difficulties involved. Working with the QDAP group has been an extremely fruitful and pleasant experience. Since our annotation requirements are so complex, we have not been easy clients, but the QDAP group has always professionally and gracefully handled changes and new requests.

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