Managing Complexity: Knowledge Organisation and Qualitative Software

Qualitative research techniques are used when there is a need for a new understanding of a situation. To achieve an understanding of complex situations, the challenge faced by the researcher is to manage that complexity. This chapter shows that all qualitative research requires knowledge organisation. Managing the overwhelming detail of data and putting it into context requires sophisticated storage and access methods, which can assist a project of any size to achieve a better, more rigorous outcome. Software designed for that purpose is useful in qualitative research of any scale. And a toolkit for qualitative analysis is also a toolkit for organising many types of knowledge — what is known a priori and what is discovered during the enquiry, as well as the knowledge derived from search and scrutiny. Researcher and manager share the task of bringing these together in order to reach an understanding of a situation, an issue or a problem.