Requal for qualitative research project?

[GerryT11]

Thank you for requal! I tested it and it looks nice. I consider Reqal for a qualitative research project with ~70 qualitative interviews and 6 focus group discussions. Would you consider Requal usable for a project like this? Was Requal already used in research projects and publications? Thank you.

[hlageek]

Hi @GerryT11 and thanks for considering requal for your project. At the moment, requal can be used for projects that do not require advanced features (e.g., visualizations, code hierarchy - though this will soon be offered, attributes, cases) and can be carried out within a basic "code and retrieve" paradigm.

The number of documents is not really an issue, but since the document management is very basic (e.g., no folder structure), I would recommend for larger projects to come up with a good naming scheme. It is possible that that with a truly large number of coded segments there might be some performance penalty in the retrieval phase - if you would experience this, let us know and we would implement some optimizations for listing of the coded segments.

If you intended to use a server version with a larger team working simultaneously in real time (more than 10-15 concurrent users), I would recommend deploying requal via https://www.shinyproxy.io rather than a Shiny Server. In asynchronous use, the number of team members per project is not a limiting factor.

For single-user desktop uses, in which you can back up projects simply by keeping a copy of the project database, I would suggest installing the development version of requal, which will have the latest features and bug fixes.

Our team member @martin-hajek co-authored a paper https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2024.35 using requal and employs requal in classroom setting, so he will be able to comment more on the user-centered experiences. Multiple student theses have been conducted with requal as far as I know (some can be found e.g. via Google Scholar).

Lastly, I should note that the next big development effort will focus on exporting/importing projects through REFI-QDA schema, which would allow you to move your project in/out of requal and use other QDA software.