VIDEOS
See firsthand how MQUAD can benefit you and your work including: the steps of establishing your account, importing your resources and descriptors, building and perfecting your coding system, excerpting your texts, applying the relevant codes, exploring and interpreting your work, and, exporting your final results in a form ready for use in your article or report.
Welcome to MQUAD
Welcome to MQUAD! This video provides an introduction to the MQUAD application and how it can help with the management, integration, and analysis of text, video, audio, spreadsheet, and other kinds of data in a secure and awesome collaborative environment. Perfect for individuals or teams, from high-school students to expert social scientists...and great for teaching too. Entirely web-based, so access your data from anywhere, anytime, and all for an inexpensive monthly subscription fee. Check it out!
Orientation
Dr. Eli Lieber, of UCLA's Center for Culture and Health, provides a quick overview of qualitative and mixed methods research and shows how MQUAD enhances these approaches with regard to data management, excerpting and coding, and analysis. Contemporary social scientists increasingly cross disciplinary boundaries to bring multiple perspectives to research problems and more fully represent social world complexity. MQUAD helps make this work efficient, effective, and collaborative.
Code Setup
Your code system is the 'conceptual framework' you will use to organize and understand your data and then communicate the findings to your audience—like the major outline items that will frame your qualitative or mixed methods story. This video shows you how to build your code system from scratch—define codes and weight systems, build in a hierarchy, and make any modifications as you go. The MQUAD code tree features are flexible and transparent so you can easily build a system that captures all key content.
Descriptors
Descriptor data are the demographic, scale, rating, and other data you collect from the sources of your qualitative data--i.e., the characteristics of your participants, settings, or communities. Using descriptors in a MQUAD project is key to conducting truly mixed methods research. In this video, you will learn about descriptor sets, defining fields (or variables), and creating descriptors (the data). MQUAD makes it a straightforward process to create descriptors within the system or easily import directly from Excel.
Documents
Documents are often the core qualitative data in your qualitative or mixed methods research project. These can be text only, have images, and/or include hyperlinks that point to other data stored elsewhere (e.g., video, audio, websites, and images). This is the rich content you will excerpt, code, and analyze. Here you will learn to create documents inside of MQUAD or import them directly alone or in batches. Also, you will learn to modify titles/descriptions, delete, and link to descriptors for truly mixed methods analysis.
Document Excerpting
Excerpting is the process of identifying meaningful content in your qualitative data, selecting, and then tagging the section with any number of appropriate codes (and any associated weights/ratings). This process is the heart of the work you will do with your texts to prepare for qualitative or mixed methods analysis. This video shows how to create and code excerpts and how MQUAD makes the process easy and efficient.
Excerpting Audio, Video, and Images
This video gives a special look at importing, excerpting, and synching transcripts to video and audio in MQUAD. Distinct from working with documents, you will learn to move along the stream's timeline of a stream, zoom, and excerpt and tag clips. Where you have (or wish to create) transcripts, see how to synch this text to excerpts so you have both the clip and the text when you hit an excerpt in a search. Lastly, learn how to code image files within MQUAD
Analysis
MQUAD automatically generates a range of informative and interactive data visualizations to assist in the discovery and exploration of important patterns in your qualitative and mixed methods data. In the rich and complex social world, the relations between peoples' characteristics and the ideas they communicate can be obscured. See how the MQUAD charts, tables, and plots facilitate your exploration and representation of your data and then how to export to Word or Excel for use in presentations and manuscripts.
Filtering
For many users, the MQUAD data visualizations and associated features are all they need to analyze their qualitative and mixed methods data and extract the results they need to support their theoretical arguments. Yet, there is more for the sophisticated user who wishes to filter their data and focus their analysis on specific subsets. In this video, you'll be introduced to how Boolean operator-like filters can be created, activated, and then saved for later use in the Data Set Workspace.
Training Center
At MQUAD we believe strongly in the systematic and rigorous application of methods. With qualitative data coding and code weighting/rating, best practices include working toward consistency in how team members independently carry out their work. Learn here about the MQUAD Training Center which was designed to help build, assess, and maintain inter-rater reliability via tests with results including Cohen's Kappa, Pearson's r, and other diagnostics to help demonstrate the rigor in your work.