Continuing with the MAXDAYS 2025 sessions, tonight I watched Dr. Kimberly King-Jupiter from Alabama State University and Anita Jarman, a graduate student at Morgan State University, present. Their session had the title “Making Sense of Copious Amounts of Information in a Digital Age.” King-Jupiter spoke about the power of the tool and what can be accomplished with it. They performed a Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) study investigating levels of equity in several states. For QCA, the steps King-Jupiter listed according to Schreier (2013) are:
- Decide on a research question
- Document selection
- Coding framework
- Segmentation
- Trial coding
- Evaluation & modifying the coding framework
- Main analysis
- Present & interpret the findings
Jarman explained that they had 97 documents for the QCA. Within the analysis section of MAXQDA, they created a worksheet to organize their research study. The worksheet includes the topic and research question. They then imported the documents: court documents, articles, cases… Jarman sorted the decrees by state using folders. Document memos, Jarman emphasized, are important for organization. The Auto-coding tool was used by Jarman to find specific key words. King-Jupiter noted that reviewing auto-coded segments and writing memos are critical steps. They set the auto-coded segments to “paragraphs” to have context. Jarman suggested using different color tags in MAXQDA to organize. Jarman also demonstrated how easy it is to create subcodes and memos. King-Jupiter explained complex coding tools and finding the intersection of two codes. Jarman and King-Jupiter shared how they include items in their worksheet. They also used MAXQDA Tailwind AI analysis. King-Jupiter noted that Tailwind provided good suggestions for topics, but the system is currently limited to twenty documents. This session helped me think about a workflow for the next project I take on!
