A User-Friendly Introduction to RQDA for Qualitative Research: Recommendations for Social Work Students and Educators

ABSTRACT

This article introduces an open-source software package —R for Qualitative Data Analysis (RQDA). RQDA is an R package for analysis of text-formatted data, which is compatible across operating platforms. It is user-friendly and seamlessly integrates with R, which makes it possible to conduct statistical analyses on qualitative coding. Alternative qualitative software packages are often prohibitively expensive. Thus, many researchers choose to manually code data using colors or other category identifiers. Nevertheless, the limitations of manual coding become increasingly obvious as the number of themes or complexity of the coding system increases. Using data examples, we provided a step-by-step guide for qualitative data analyses demonstrate the basic functions of the RQDA package. Advantages and disadvantages of using RQDA are discussed

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erica E. Nason

Erica E. Nason is an assistant professor at Texas State University. Kaipeng Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver. Angela R. Ausbrooks is an associate professor at Texas State University.