Introduction to Requal: Increasing Transparency and Reflexivity of Qualitative Coding

Webinar slides: https://zenodo.org/records/15665092
Requal website: https://requal.fsv.cuni.cz/
Requal Github repository: https://github.com/RE-QDA/requal

The workshop will introduce Requal, a lightweight and easy-to-use, free and open source software for coding qualitative data such as interview transcripts, field notes, or text documents, allowing for easy coding, filtering, and export of annotated text segments. Requal works as both a desktop and server application, supporting real-time multi-user collaboration. The main advantage of Requal over similar software is that it provides several reproducibility features and modules that help users increase the transparency and reflexivity of their analyses.

First, it allows users to specify research-relevant coder attributes, such as gender, experience, age, and ethnicity, and to monitor whether and how these attributes are reflected in coding patterns. Second, it calculates and visualizes the correspondence between codes, coders, and categories of coders, facilitating discussion of intra-team differences. Third, users can view logs of their actions, which supports traceability of coding processes. In practice, Requal is useful for individual researchers, but finds its best use in team-based research and training in qualitative data analysis, where it benefits from its multi-user web operability, ease of use, and reproducibility modules. See: requal.fsv.cuni.cz

About the speaker:

Martin Hájek is an associate professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague. He is co-developer of Requal. He has a long-standing interest in sociological methodology, and especially in text, discourse, and narrative analysis. He is the author of The Reader and the Machine: Selected Methods of Social Science Text Analysis (Prague, 2015, in Czech).