by Colin on October 20, 2009
Need to find a good time to schedule your next meeting?
WhenIsGood.net compiled a random sample of over 100,000 responses to meeting invitations and found that event invitations are most likely to be accepted on Tuesday at 3pm.
Groups have been using WhenIsGood.net since 2007 to find meeting times that work for everyone. The meeting coordinator simply starts an event, suggests a range of times and dates, then circulates an invitation link via email. Participants indicate the best time for them, so the coordinator can make an informed scheduling decision.
In addition to confirming the optimal meeting time on Tuesdays, WhenIsGood.net anonymously sampled user data and found that the afternoon is generally freer than the morning (especially first thing in the morning).
Interestingly, they didn’t find much variation between days of the week. People are just as available on Wednesday as they are on Friday or Monday.
Funny thing is…we used to always reserve Tuesday at 3pm as our flexible meeting time, to meet about a specific subject if necessary. Of course, now we’re juggling the daily schedules of full-time students, hourly workers and distributed employees, and Tuesday at 3pm doesn’t quite cut it anymore.
What about you? Has your group found a meeting time that tends to work for everyone?
Here’s the full report from WhenIsGood.net.
by Colin on October 13, 2009
(Part 4 of 5 from the series: 5 Steps to Mastering Qualitative Data Analysis)
So you’re done taking a first pass at coding. Nice! The goal of coding is to separate the content from the fluff, while marking your meaningful content with appropriate themes.
The next step is to review the work we’ve done and look for redundant codes, groups of similar codes and categories that need to be split up.
Fortunately, Qualrus puts everything we need in one place: the Code Editor.
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by Colin on October 6, 2009
(Part 3 of 5 from the series: 5 Steps to Mastering Qualitative Data Analysis)
Now that you know and love your data, it’s time to begin coding.
Coding is the central process of qualitative research, where you begin giving meaning to your unstructured information. Your goal is to accurately classify data with appropriate, consistent themes.
We do this by designating certain parts of our source as a segment, and assigning one or more codes to that segment. A segment can include any length of text, but each segment should represent a coherent thought (we generally create segments 2-6 sentences long).
When reading through a particular passage, ask yourself: “What is the fundamental meaning of this section? What themes or ideas are discussed?”
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