As a pure RIA (Rich Internet Application), Dedoose is built upon and will grow with cutting edge technological developments. If you have a computer and a browser, it's very likely your computer already has absolutely everything you need to unleash all the power of Dedoose. And being platform independent, it doesn’t matter what kind of computer you are using, Windows based, Mac… whatever, you can use Dedoose right now, for free!

What does web-based mean?

• Nothing to download, install, or maintain on your computer, get started instantly!
• Automatic upgrades—it’s all included, new features are yours the moment they go live, which is often!
• Anytime, anywhere, any-computer availability — access Dedoose from any web connected computer!
• Teamwork oriented—multi-user, simultaneous, real-time access with granular per user security
• No hidden IT costs, no server required, no annual support fees, it's all included!

While the individual user won't miss out on anything the system has to offer, Dedoose was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of multi-member project teams. Your project data and system features are available to all authorized members of your team—simultaneously and dynamically—all in real time. Regardless of where your team members work or travel, the only thing they need to participate in your project is access to the Internet, a browser, and passwords that your project administrator provides and controls.

What does collaborative mean?

• All team members can access Dedoose from anywhere, and work together in real-time!
• Granular access controls that allow project administrators to edit security profiles that fit the needs of your project
• Chat system allows all project members to communicate in real-time
• Increased data quality through cross-member reliability, objectivity, and efficient communication
• Tools to develop, calculate, and document inter-rater reliability for both code application and code weighting

Transparency is central to the design of all Dedoose features. You can move seamlessly and naturally through all aspects of your database. Dedoose keeps all data in context, always allowing you to click on any piece to drill deeper, or easily return to where the information originated. Throughout, Dedoose you have the ability to export any and all of the work you’ve done in Dedoose into a variety of familiar formats: charts, graphs, excerpts, descriptors …and importing is just as easy

How does this help?

• See quotations in context while exploring your resources, building your tag/code system, or excerpting
• With our migration tools, you can import your existing project data from SurveyMonkey, Atlas.ti, NVivo, and more!
• Drill down into your data through the compelling and informative data visualizations and narrow your analysis with the Dedoose Data Selector or other filtering features
• Export your data from any place in the system into common file formats—ready to open and access in the software you already own and are comfortable using

We have a radically different design philosophy at Dedoose—enhance user experience while interacting with every Dedoose feature, simple or complex! This means that rather than building an application from a bullet point list of features, we designed it from the perspective of what users wish and need to accomplish and how best to support efficient workflow. So, you won't find every feature plastered all over Dedoose. Rather, features are present when you need them so your workflow makes natural sense. This simplicity and efficiency has always been a core part of our mission so that all users will have access to what they need, when they need them, and it will all make intuitive sense so research can be engaging and effective…Great Research Made Easy! From the start, we expect you’ll find Dedoose to be easy to learn, logical, attractive, and supportive whether you are a young student, early-career professional, or experienced expert researcher. Features were conceived to be straightforward and salient so every user can easily benefit from what Dedoose has to offer. Working with Dedoose will come as naturally as navigating a typical Website. Dedoose is intuitive and inviting, encouraging you to make full use of its cutting-edge features.

Straightforward, logical, and supportive?

• Dedoose has a small and shallow learning-curve—despite its immensely powerful platform
• So intuitive that many users never bother to read the user guide, or watch the training videos!
• Save on the outrageous training costs many find necessary to make use of other non-intuitive software
• Clear and consistent organization
• Intelligent reminders and cues throughout—right there, when you need them
• Step-by-step user guide and video tutorials
• Informative dashboards in every workspace, each filled with instant menu-driven data visualizations

Dedoose is rich with graphical and tabular presentations of your data AND the work you’ve done with these data. Throughout Dedoose you are instantly presented with interactive ‘pictures’ of your work. Every visualization is easily controlled with menu-drive options to facilitate your search for and understanding of patterns in your data. These interactive and dynamic displays offer many alternative views and allow fast and intuitive ways to move deeper into your data—and each, with the underlying data, can be quickly exported to include in reports and presentations.

The power to visualize your data!

• Over 40 interactive data visualizations including bar charts, pie charts, bubble plots, grid charts, word clouds, and so much more!
• All visualizations are fully exportable to PDF and Excel with all underlying data intact!
• All chart features include full excerpt click-through and the underlying excerpts can be exported to Word or Excel with all associated data!
• Informative and compelling visualizations simplify the communication of research results and findings
• Dynamic and interactive—these visualizations serve as windows into the depths of your data and all excerpting and coding activity
• Multi-dimensional evidence-based conceptual modeling
• Easily view your descriptor ratios, code application activity, code application correlation, code by descriptor break-out, and the list goes on…and on

The Dedoose code-tree is incredibly flexible. Newly-created codes can expand the tree horizontally or vertically, code definition and exemplar information can be accessed with a click of the mouse, and your custom rating, ranking, and/or weighting systems can be defined and activated with ease. The code-tree is also fully dynamic in its functionality. At any time you can modify the tree by simply dragging and dropping a particular code from one branch of the tree to another and all the work you've done with that code up to that point follows right along…true for code merging too! (And not to worry, Dedoose allows project managers to decide who can alter the code system and who can’t—you control all access and control privileges)

Resources are your interviews, stories, fieldnotes, focus group transcripts, audio files, video, photos—your qualitative data. Descriptors are the demographics, quantitative variables, test scores, and other identifiers for each case, person, transcript, setting…in your database. These descriptor data—all the information you collect about the individuals, groups, or settings that are the focus of your research—can take many forms (e.g., numeric, textual, date, categorical/nominal and others).

Dedoose resource and descriptor manager features and wizards guide you quickly through the process of importing all your project data via commonly used file formats so you can get working right away. Further, smart import engines assure the reliability and validity of your data as you bring them to Dedoose—you’ll see previews and data verification reports on possible problems alongside clear solutions before you upload your project data into Dedoose.

Dedoose provides the ability to create multiple descriptor sets within a single project to deal with the real and natural complexity of the worlds people live in. For example, create one for individuals, one for families, and one for communities and your analyses can reach across these levels to fully represent the natural complexity of phenomena and effects. Change over time can be assessed using Dedoose dynamic descriptor fields. Define a descriptor field as dynamic and you set the value for each new resource you submit to Dedoose. For example, when doing multiple interviews or focus groups over time you can set the ‘Time’ variable as ‘Baseline,’ ‘Time 1,’ ‘Time 2’… think natural development or the effects of your program, advertising, news event changed something? With dynamic descriptor data, Dedoose makes the identification and understanding of change over time fast, visual, and straightforward.

Easy excerpting—marking sections of an interview, notes, focus group, or other resource for coding is at the heart of Dedoose. Once identified, excerpts can be described in a memo, assigned any number of codes, and, if you choose, rated based on any rating/weighting system you have defined for a code. Dedoose excerpting, colorization, and excerpt indicator and information features make the process easy and transparent. Further, viewing your excerpting work is in your face on the Dedoose screen, and it’s easy to activate and modify excerpts (and their coding) at any time.

If excerpting (coding meaningful segments of information) is the heart of Dedoose, then the Dedoose data visualizations, filtering, and analysis features are its brain. Together, these features provide automatically generated, visually compelling, and informative presentations of your data and coding activities. These visualizations are gorgeous, information-rich, and ready to drop right into your presentation.

Dedoose's true strength: amazing interactive visualizations!

• Over 40 interactive data visualizations including bar charts, pie charts, bubble plots, grid charts, word clouds, and so much more!
• All visualizations are fully exportable to PDF and Excel with all underlying data intact!
• All chart features include full excerpt click-through and the underlying excerpts can be exported to Word or Excel with all associated data!
• Informative and compelling visualizations simplify the communication of research results and findings
• Dynamic and interactive—these visualizations serve as windows into the depths of your data and all excerpting and coding activity
• Multi-dimensional evidence-based conceptual modeling
• Easily view your descriptor ratios, code application activity, code application correlation, code by descriptor break-out, and the list goes on…and on

Have more complex questions? Want to drill deeper into your data? The Dedoose ‘Data Selector’ allows you to filter based on ANY piece of data in your project. Complex searching and filtering can be daunting, but Dedoose is designed to keep it all transparent. Intuitive and powerful filtering via Boolean operators and sorting features allow easy examination of results from any number of perspectives. Combine excerpts or resources into subgroups based on any combination of filters (e.g., by type of resource, user, participant characteristics, code, or quantitative data on individuals or groups) and move seamlessly back and forth between the results, your excerpts, and your resources. Powerful and intuitive on the surface, but easy to navigate and you will never lose track of where you’ve ventured into your data since Dedoose always shows indicators of the filtering activity and provides toggles to compare filter results with the full data set.

The Dedoose Analysis Center is filled with a wide range of data visualization options—through the menu-driven bar charts, pie charts, and conceptual maps (bubble plots), it’s easy to dig in, discover, and explore what sits beneath the surface. Like what you see? Prepare and export results to your desktop on the fly—and it’s easy and quick to recreate similar analyses after making changes to the underlying data as any filtering can be saved in a library with user-generated descriptions to reactivate in the future.

We recognize the importance of establishing and maintaining reliability for both your tagging/coding application and weighting. The Dedoose Training Center is a unique and easy-to-use feature for teams to establish and maintain inter-rater reliability. Your tag/code system represents the conceptual framework you have developed to understand and communicate your findings to others. Demonstrating reliable application of this system to your data is fundamental to the strength and credibility of the arguments you present to your audience and the confidence you will have in your data and the results of your analysis.

In the Dedoose Training Center, project leaders prepare training sessions by setting standards for code application and code weighting/rating. You select which codes and excerpts to include in a ‘test’ for training and establishing reliability. These excerpts and the associated coding/ratings become the basis for training and evaluating the performance of your team members and Dedoose provides many diagnostics to assist in this process.

Once your team has discussed the codes, definitions, and application criteria, you want to assure that all members will be following these rules in consistent ways. Your team can then ‘train’ online in the Training Center to demonstrate their coding proficiency, learn from the mistakes, and document the successes. They can perform these exercises independently with considerable online support from Dedoose and the results are available to team leaders to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each coder. For code application, Dedoose calculates and presents both a pooled Cohen's Kappa for inter-rater reliability across all codes in the test and a Cohen’s Kappa for each individual code. For code weighting/rating, Dedoose calculates Pearson’s correlation coefficient and other diagnostics on relative agreement. Further, beyond the simple metrics indicating proficiency levels, a range of diagnostic details are provided to help identify where and what additional training would be required, including item-by-item comparisons between the expert and trainee coding/rating. The team can discuss and master coding and answer questions online at any time from any location!

Your data are safely encrypted and protected, and we’ve got your back…up! Have you ever had a hard drive crash? Some estimate that 140,000 hard drives crash every week in the United States alone. Let’s face it, in every industry there are ‘acceptable’ rates for product failure. Independent research estimates of hard drive failure rates range from 1.7% for new drives to over 8.6% for drives in their third year of use. At all times, Dedoose project data remains secure and safely mirrored, backed-up, and protected according to the highest industry standards. You'll never worry about computer theft, disk failure, memory loss, file corruption, or any of the other problems that can plague your own computer and result in the loss of your valuable work—now that feels safer! And if you want to download your data, your welcome to export everything at anytime. To see a complete overview of our data security protocols please click here.

Although we have strived to make Dedoose incredibly intuitive, we have provided many support options for new and experienced users. A set of helpful videos introduce and provide step-by-step instruction for all critical project tasks. Similarly, the Dedoose user guide was written with extensive detail and contains thorough information on how to get started and get the best out of what Dedoose has to offer. The growing list of FAQs provides response to the questions users pose most. And, finally, the SocioCultural Research Consultants team (the team that brought you Dedoose) is prepared to provide access to our network of research professionals trained and experienced in all aspects of social science and marketing research.

Fanatic Support:

• The video tutorials offer in-depth guides into all areas of Dedoose and mixed methods research
• The User Guide offers thorough step-by-step instructions for all Dedoose features
• The Dedoose Forum offers a great way to collaborate with all Dedoose users and the Dedoose team
• Our team is filled with experienced and well-published qualitative and mixed methods researchers
• We rapidly respond to all email and phone questions
• If Dedoose is missing a feature you want, we have a proven track record of delivering on these requests in our forum