Jane Lê, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Jane Lê

Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) like NVivo is becoming increasingly popular in organizational research. This is partially because the analysis of rich, deep qualitative data makes important contributions to the management field (Bansal & Corley, 2011; Gephart, 2004; Lee, 2001; Rynes, 2007), but difficult and time consuming. CAQDAS were introduced to help simplify this process, both in terms of data management and in terms of data analysis support. However, CAQDAS should be employed with an important caveat: While they may assist the analytic process by acting as database, providing a structured framework for analysis, and offering some analytic tools, the software cannot actually do any analysis. Thus, the very name “qualitative data analysis software” is deceptive. You still do the analysis; the software only provides tools that may support the process. In other words, the software cannot take the all-important “creative leap” for you (Langley, 1999).

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