Qualitative data analysis software: The state of the art

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the ‘state of the art’ of QDA or CAQDAS software. As the range and number of packages have increased over the years, I needed to make a decision about how I wanted to approach it. As the recent hype on ‘big’ and social media data has also left its mark on the type of functionality we see emerge in CAQDAS packages, and with this on the need for different types of analysis tools, I decided to use Kahneman’s ideas about slow and fast thinking as a framework (Kahneman, 2011). Slow thinking in the context of CAQDAS is related to researcher driven analysis and fast thinking to tool and data driven analysis. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part I describe trends and new developments and in the second part I offer a critical appraisal. I assume that readers are familiar with the basic functionalities of at least one of the CAQDAS packages.