requal

The goal of requal is to provide reproducibility support for qualitative coding.

Installation

Prerequisites

To use requal, you need to have the R language installed and running on your machine. You can download and install R from here). You will also need a web browser with JavaScript support (i.e. any of the standard issue browsers like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari).

Package

You can install requal from GitHub by following these steps (assuming you have R installed on your machine):

1. Download the current release of requal from Releases.
2. Install the remotes package by running install.packages("remotes") command in R console.
3. Install the requal package by running remotes::install_local(file.choose()) and selecting the downloaded release file on your hard-drive.

Development version

The development version contains the latest features, but might be less stable than a released version.

You can install the development version of requal from GitHub by running this code in R:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("RE-QDA/requal")

Usage

The requal app can be launched from the R console with the following command:

requal::run_app(options = list("launch.browser"))

On the first launch of the app, use the “Create” menu to set up a new project by providing a name and selecting a folder for your project. The app will create an SQLite database file with the .requal extension and start up the project.

requal is a shiny application that runs in your browser and provides basic functionality for annotating documents in plain text with user-defined codes. The annotated text segments can be filtered and exported. More functions are coming up.

Collaborative usage

requal is designed with reproducibility, openness, and transparency in mind, and these values are most evident when it’s used collaboratively. You can achieve this by self-hosting requal on your own server. A server instance of requal can support multiple users and offers fine-grained permission settings, making it easier to form diverse teams and collaborate in real time. With requal, you can discuss codes, evaluate agreement on codes, and estimate the sensitivity of coding to the attributes of your team members.

However, setting up a server instance is not a simple task. It requires a basic level of system administration experience. If you need assistance, the IT department at your institution should be able to help set up an requal server instance by following these instructions. To get a sense of how requal operates in server mode, take a look at the public demo available on the requal project website.

NOTE: It is crucial to prioritize data security when hosting your requal instance publicly over the internet. At the very least, enabling the TLS protocol is a necessary precaution. However, be aware that this measure alone will not fully protect you from knowledgeable attackers. Consequently, it is important that you only analyze public, GDPR-compliant, and non-confidential data via requal in server mode. If you intend to use requal for collaborative work involving confidential or sensitive data, ensure this is done behind adequate firewalls or on internal networks established in secure locations. Always consult with your data stewards and/or research ethics committee to determine the appropriate level of security control for your dataset. In the future, we plan to provide support for data de-identification. This will allow you to perform de-identification locally and collaboratively analyze the de-identified dataset online.

Acknowledgment

The application development has been supported by The Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project n. TL05000054, and CLS INFRA Fellowship Programme.