Yes, Dedoose can handle virtually any language and character set.

Dynamic descriptor fields are an advanced type of option list field available in Dedoose. Dynamic descriptors let you see and explore change over time when you collect qualitative data at multiple time points. These fields can only be defined within Dedoose and their values are determined when a descriptor is linked to a resource. To illustrate when a dynamic descriptor might be use, imagine you are doing an 18-month study on elementary school student reading skills and will interview the students three times. Some of the descriptor data for each participant will be the same at all time-points, but some will change—for example, student gender, ethnicity, and family SES group might stay the same over the course of the project, but the time of measurement (e.g., baseline, time 1, time 2) or classroom grade (e.g., 3rd, 4th, 5th) might change. If you make time of measurement or class grade dynamic descriptors you will be prompted to set the value (e.g., baseline, time 1, time 2) when linking the qualitative resource to a descriptor. Subsequently, your excerpting and tagging activity for those qualitative resources will be linked to the specific time point. With data like these, Dedoose allows you to explore change over the three time-points and there are a set of graphs built into Dedoose to facilitate exposing patterns of change and drilling into the meaning of the patterns that emerge.

Multiple descriptor sets are designed for studies using multiple levels of analysis. For example, if a study is comparing the success of different school districts there might be three levels of data: 1) the district, 2) the schools within a district, and 3) the students within a school. It is likely that different sets of descriptor variables would be collected at each level, i.e., district level variables (e.g., average family annual income, square miles of capture area, percent rural versus urban neighborhoods), school level variables (e.g., size of student population, student-teacher ratio, percent of children on free lunch program), and student level variables (e.g., age, gender, size of family, language spoken at home, standardized test scores). If the study involves interviews with parents about the home environment, each interview could be linked to three descriptors: the one specific to their child, their child’s school, and their school district. Dedoose allows exploration of qualitative data and tagging activity across descriptors. Thus, in a study like this, variation in the qualitative data could be explored as a function of district, school, or student variables and combinations of them.

A number of predefined user groups are available to project administrators so they can control levels of access to the project database. To use them, the administrator selects the groups required for the project and the move users into the various groups according to the profile of privileges and restrictions appropriate for their role on the project.

Unfortunately not…the indexing that takes place as excerpts are created and tagged is very complicated and any modification to a resource once that activity has begun would cause confusing results.

Absolutely, part of Dedoose’s flexibility in how different approaches to mixed methods work are accommodated is to allow any modification to a tag system and/or tag definition at anytime during the course of a project.

Confusing results can occur when trying to import Excel data from a file with multiple worksheets. The solution is to create two files with only one worksheet each—one for the descriptor field definitions and one for the descriptor datWe usually just create copies of the file and then delete the worksheets with other datBUT BE CAREFUL HERE as sometimes worksheet sitting to the left of the one you want are hidden from view, so you need to scroll left in the list of worksheets (with the controls at the bottom of the file) to expose the additional worksheets that need to be deleted.

These are two approaches that Dedoose employs to helping you see where excerpting activity has been done and what tags have been applied. Both are visual cues as to where you have already excerpted as you browse your resources. Moreover, a click on the bracket will take you into excerpt editing mode for that particular excerpt and allow for additional tagging, the removal of previously applied tags, or deleting the entire excerpt.

Click the Edit Tags button on the ‘Tags’ panel header: Make the desired changes and then click the 'Exit Editing' button.

This is a simple cell formatting issue. Highlight the column with data that aren’t displaying properly and format the cells as ‘General’ by: (a) clicking the right mouse button, choose ‘Format Cells,’ and click ‘General’ under the ‘Number’ tab or (b) open the ‘Cells’ menu on the main menu bar, click ‘Format Cells,’ and click ‘General’ under the ‘Number’ tab.

There are no differences in Dedoose between tags and codes and these terms can be used interchangeably to refer to the ‘labels’ that make up the tag system to represent the themes or concepts that will be used to organize the qualitative data and communicate research findings.

When data have been filtered, you can easily save the filtered data set for future use or turn off the filter. In the Data Selector workspace, click the ‘Data Sets’ tab and click ‘Create’ in the lower right corner to save the current set or click ‘Clear Current Set’ in the lower left corner to clear all current filtering.

Yes. When importing descriptors to Dedoose a validation check review screen is presented before you can submit the data to the system. If data are missing, there will be a warning in the error section that identifies any missing data as ‘Not a valid option.’ Regardless of any errors, the data can still be imported by clicking ‘Submit.’

Yes, updating descriptor fields and data involves four steps: 1) adding the new descriptor fields, 2) exporting the existing descriptor data, 3) adding the new records and data to the database (you will see that Dedoose has added an ID number for existing records to assure the data will remain linked to any associated resources), and 4) re-importing the descriptors to the project.

User that have access to 2 or more projects will see the ‘Projects’ button on the main menu bar. Dedoose will always load the most recent project you had accessed, so click that button to select a different project than the one you most recently accessed.

Text in Dedoose is presented via the Adobe platform. While this is a very powerful and flexible platform, it requires a ‘re-drawing’ when changes are made. When using the up/down arrows to scroll, the updated location in the document will not be presented until the button is released—upon release, the document is presented in the new location. To avoid any confusion about location in the document, the scroll bar can be dragged to a new position or the scroll wheel on a mouse can be used—both of these approaches utilize a real-time dynamic presentation of the document view.

Yes, and this can be a great way to link activities within Dedoose to resources located outside the Dedoose project.

No, this is simply a function of the tree being redrawn upon applying a check mark and does not affect functionality.

The maximum number of level in a tag/code tree is limited to five.

There are basically three ways to add users to a Dedoose project depending on whether the user already has an account. All additions take place in the security center and must be carried out by a user with administrative privileges. When attempting to add a user, the system will prompt you for an email address.
i. If the email address is already associated with a Dedoose account holder, you will have the option to invite them to be linked to your project. If they accept, you can then assign them to an access group.
ii. If the email is not found to be associated with a Dedoose account holder, you will have the option to create (and pay for) an account for the new user, or invite the individual to create their own Dedoose account and then be linked to your project.

Adobe Flash, which makes Dedoose such a cool and dynamic tool, uses a lot of system memory. As you work, some of this memory gets used to store previously viewed information. The easiest and quickest way to clear this memory:
i. For PC users—click into the browser address bar and click the F5 key on your keyboard.
ii. For Mac users—click into the browser address bar and click Cmd-R

While very generous, limits have been set on different aspects of a Dedoose project to protect the client-side system performance—Dedoose servers can handle endless amounts of data, but contemporary local computer resources do present some limitations. The maximum limits for aspects of a Dedoose project are descriptor field sets = 10/project, descriptor fields = 50/set, descriptors = 5000/project, and resources = 5000/project.

The pre-defined access list settings have been found to meet virtually all the needs of Dedoose users. However, if your project presents a unique situation, please feel free to contact Dedoose support and we will do all we can to help solve the problem.

All data submitted to a Dedoose project are automatically saved in real-time so you never have to worry about losing data because you forgot to click ‘save.’

When viewing a document there is a button in the upper left corner of the document panel labeled with the document name. Click this button to open a ‘Edit Document’ panel. Here you can modify the document title or description and click ‘Submit’ to save. Or, you can delete the document by clicking the ‘Delete Document’ button in the lower left corner of the panel.

Yes. The desktop app is a copy of the web application that is able to run outside the web browser to enhance the user experience. This means you still need an internet connection to connect to your project data. We are exploring several ways to allow the desktop version to work in an offline mode, but this is scheduled for the future at the momment.