Qualitative methods open analytical pathways and present specific challenges, particularly for early career scholars forging a path in a field dominated by quantitative inquiry. However, for many scholars, qualitative methods reflect a particular ontological point of view, which tends toward privileging the experiences of groups that are often marginalized in research. Given this point of view,...

Qualitative simulation predicts the set of possible behaviors consistent with a qualitative differential equation model of the world. Its value comes from the ability to express natural types of incomplete knowledge of the world, and the ability to derive a provably complete set of possible behaviors in spite of the incompleteness of the model. A qualitative differential equation model (QDE) is...

BACKGROUND Health policy makers now have access to a greater number and variety of systematic reviews to inform different stages in the policy making process, including reviews of qualitative research. The inclusion of mixed methods studies in systematic reviews is increasing, but these studies pose particular challenges to methods of review. This article examines the quality of the reporting o...

Building qualitative models is still a difficult and lengthy endeavour for domain experts. This paper discusses progress towards an automated modelling algorithm that learns Garp3 models based on a full qualitative description of the system’s behaviour. In contrast with other approaches (Bridewell et al. 2008; Bratko and Šuc 2004), our algorithm attempts to learn the causality that explains the...

Real-time qualitative road traffic data analysis is the cornerstone for any modern transport system. So far, most of the analysis is done manually and the use of image processing techniques for qualitative analysis is at its early stage. In this paper we concentrate on qualitative analysis of a traffic scene, which is describing the traffic scene similar to the description of a traffic expert w...

Reliance on the identification of themes as the goal of analysis is endemic in qualitative research. Often, in funding proposals, there will be a lengthy description of how qualitative data are going to be gathered, but the only thing said about how these data are going to be managed or analysed is that ‘themes will be identified in the data’. Similarly, writers of journal articles often simply...

This paper provides an introduction to the subject of qualitative research and a practical approach to conducting this type of research through a detailed description of the design and methodology used in a specific study. The purpose of qualitative research is to describe and interpret issues or phenomena from the point of view of the individual or population being studied, and to generate new...

Utility Computing service provision aims to control the service quality for a wide range of consumers. To closely control the desired service quality in each phase of the service operations lifecycle, it is essential to be able to describe the quantitative and qualitative relation between consumer and provider. This work introduces Usage Patterns as a description language for the planning of qu...

This memorandum offers concrete guidance on how to make the presentation and use of qualitative data in published scholarship more transparent. This is an important goal, whether the data are employed for description, narrative, interpretation, analysis, or causal inference. The document aims to provide a strategy to accommodate evolving disciplinary standards for data access and research trans...