Kieren Diment's Personal Website

All Publications

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:44:32 GMT

Garrett-Jones, S., Turpin, T., & Diment, K. (2009). Managing competition between individual and organizational goals in cross-sector research and development centres. The Journal of Technology Transfer. doi: 10.1007/s10961-009-9139-x.  

Diment, K., & Trout, M. (2009). The Definitive Guide to Catalyst: Writing Extendable, Scalable and Maintainable Perl–Based Web Applications (1st ed.). Apress.  

Massingham, P., & Diment, K. (2009). Organizational commitment, knowledge management interventions, and learning organization capacity. The Learning Organization, 16(2), 122-142.  

Cameron, S, Dowton, M, Castro, L, Ruberu, K, Whiting, M, Austin, A, Diment, K, & Stevens, J. (2008). Mitochondrial genome organization and phylogeny of two vespid wasps. Genome, 51(10), 800-808.  

Diment, K. (2008). Promoting Climate Change Mitigation with Socal Marketing. An Exploration Based on Recent Australian Policy Development. Working Paper, University of Wollongong.

Diment, K., & Garrett-Jones, S. (2007). How Demographic Characteristics Affect Mode Preference in a Postal/Web Mixed-Mode Survey of Australian Researchers. Social Science Computer Review, 25(3), 410.  

Diment, K. (2006). Retooling the World Wide Web for its Original Purpose: Modernising the Web for University Research. In The Open Source Developers Conference, Monash University. Monash University. Retrieved from http://xrl.us/vs3q.

Garrett-Jones, S., Turpin, T., & Diment, K. (2006). Are R&D collaborators bound to compete? Experience from Cooperative Research Centres in Australia. Bergen, Norway.

Garrett-Jones, S., Turpin, T., & Diment, K. (2005). Different cultures, different perspectives: the experiences of academic and government researchers in collaborative R&D centres. The R&D Management Conference.  

Garrett-Jones, S., Turpin, T., Burns, P., & Diment, K. (2005). Common purpose and divided loyalties: the risks and rewards of cross-sector collaboration for academicandgovernmentresearchers. R&D Management, 35, 5.  

Turpin, T., Garrett-Jones, S., & Diment, K. (2004). Scientists, career choices and organisational change: Managing human resources in cross-sector R&D organisations. 18th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management: People First-Serving our Stakeholders. Dunedin: ANZAM.  

Diment, K., Hodgkinson, A., & Woods, K. (2000). An evaluation of a case-mix system for assessing the cost of post-acute brain injury rehabilitation. Westmead Hospital, Sydney.

Obonsawin, M., Kragt, L., Diment, K., & Martin, C. (1997). Measuring Personality change after Traumatic Brain Injury - pilot study and preliminary result. Seville.

Qualitative

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:57:46 GMT

Qualitative Data Analysis Notes

This page is where I'm putting up notes about my experience with the qualitative data analysis aspects of my PhD project.  It countains suggestions for other qualitative researchers, and some of my opinions about existing qualitative data analysis software and techniques.

Voice Recognition Software is a Critical
Productivity Tool for the Serious Qualitative Researcher

The first thing I have to say is that the number one tool for a serious qualitative data analyst should be voice recognition software (VRS).  As a researcher, it's much preferable to transcribe your own interviews, as you have much more contextual information available because you conducted the interview than a third party transcriber has.  This gives you better recall of your experience in the interview at the time.  However, transcribing is tedious and time consuming.  Having said this, shadowing a recording (i.e. speaking back what you hear in the headphones)  with VRS (Dragon Naturally Speaking and it's Mac counterpart Mac Speech Dictate are the only choice here as far as I can see) is an extermely efficient way of transcribing.  The minimum handling time for manual transcription would be 4 times the length of the recording and is frequently up to 8 times, depending on the quality of the recording, the speed at which people talk at, and the typing speed of the transcriber. Shadowing with the use of VRS brings handling time down to around three times the length of the recording. This may not seem like much, but 4 times is a minimum, and at minimum $120 (Australian) or more per transcribed hour of speech manually, costs quickly add up to the cost of a licence fee for the VRS.

Of course, time constraints mean that you may want to use a third party transcriber even with these time savings.  However the increase in speed and transcript quality means that you should train your transcribers to shadow and give them the software too.  It pays itself back very quickly indeed, in time, money and transcript quality.

I use the programmer's text editor emacs to do the transcripts, together with the emacs extension transcript.el which I found on the web and modified a bit.  Using this means I get plain text transcripts in the following format:

Fred: [00:00:00]
Hi Barney, how are you?
Barney: [00:00:00]
I'm pretty good Fred, have you been to work today at all?
...

I'm pretty happy with this, as the timestamp is put in by the software automatically, I can control playback straight from the keyboard (control-return to toggle stop and start, control-left and control-right to move the transcript forward and back by short steps, and control-up and control-down for long steps).  Once I've entered the two speakers, then the software automatically remembers who should be speaking next and inserts their name and timstamp automatically when you press return (or say "newline" with the VRS).

VRS is also useful for producing field notes.  While I don't use the software at all for normal written communication (like this article), it's extremely useful for field notes.  I think that this is because field notes tend to be a bit stream of consciousness, and being able to type as fast as you can talk is pretty useful for this kind of situation.  However if you are going to make field notes in the field with VRS you will need a quiet place, because aside from looking like a loony talking to your computer, accuracy will be impaired with too much background noise.

Qualitative Data Analysis Software,
or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Plain Text

Finally my thoughts on qualitative data analysis software.  Well this is a can of worms.  Qualitative analysis software is a tool, not an end.  As such it should save you time, increase accuracy and generally not get in the way of your raw data.  Wollongong's preferred qualitative data analysis package certainly doesn't fit this description.

  The only game in town at Wollongong University is NVIVO, although Atlas.ti looks like an excellent competitor (and with a more open file format which is important - see later on).  Now I've always been very suspicious of NVIVO, because once your data is in the software it's impossible to export the raw data for use by other software.  While you can export things as Microsoft Word, or plain text documents, it's clunky and makes secondary analysis outside of NVIVO very time consuming.  This is because you still have to re-reconcile your secondary data back (coded text) back to the primary data (raw transcript).  The other thing that really bugs me is that the only way that you can import properly structured text (for auto-coding) into NVIVO is via a Word document.  Even version 8 which has better HTML support doesn't allow importing properly structured documents from anything other than Word format.  Inputting properly structured text into NVIVO is important, as it allows you to auto-code by heading.  I used it to auto-code the interview speakers, and then import the nodes into case nodes.  HTML import is really important, as it's just about the easiest way to produce a properly structured document that a very wide range of software can understand.

These were my concerns before starting to use NVIVO.  I had more concerns appear with greater use though.  Here's a summary of all of them:

As mentioned, very limited interoperability in terms of the raw data.
As mentioned, no HTML import option.
It's far too easy to accidentally modify a document while doing coding
The process of coding is error prone.  It's too easy to accidentaly  miscode an part of text, or to accidentally not code it at all.
The audit tools are minimal.  In particular, I want to be able to see the difference between one session of analyis and another to be able to track my thought processes.  I can't do this at all.

An NVIVO advocate may say I'm using the software wrong.  If that's the case, it's too hard to use.  I followed the tutorial, and referred back to the documentation whenever I had a problem.  I can see how NVIVO is a good tool for people who aren't completely comfortable with computers and software, but for people who are highly computer literate, it gets in the way more than it helps.

There are probably other problems as well.  So I'm going back to basics.  All of my data is stored in plain text, closely associated with it's corresponding audio file.  I can code text with a pseudo-xml format, like this (note the curly brackets rather than the angle brackets.  This will probably be useful one day):

Fred: [00:00:00]
{q:how}Hi Barney, how are you?
Barney: [00:00:00]
I'm pretty good Fred{/q:how}, {t:activity}have you been to work today at all? {/t:activity}
...

And from there it's a pretty straightforward task to write perl code to extract the tags, or groups of tags that I'm interested in.  My preliminary tests tell me that hand typing these codes is faster than using NVIVO, and while there are scope for errors (e.g. typos, miscoding etc) I can itentify them much more clearly and close-up in the raw data.  I can do this all in the same text editor from which I do the transcribing as well.  Even though it means more typing (until I program some automatic detection of the text selection and prompting for the prefered code), I think the benefits outweigh the cost for me.  I also note that I don't have to worry about auto coding by heading any more, as the Name: [00:00:00] format is distinctive enough, and is just more fairly simple code.

For version tracking, I've found that the git version control software is very good for my needs.  Once you're used to it, reading text diffs is very simple and flexible. Text based diffs brings great clarity to understanding what you've been working on, which is why they're the stock in trade of every good computer programmer.

More to come on qualitative analysis using text based tools.  Watch my RSS feed for updates.

ace

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:17:10 GMT

Aged Care eDoc

I did two presentations, and one full paper at the Health Informatics Australia conference season in Canberra in August 2009.  I've been spending some working on how to analyze my 58 interviews, and these three outputs reflect the way I've been thinking about it to date.

The full paper is about how we can use complex adaptive systems to understand organisational change.  There's a decent sized literature on this, and my paper relates how we can use this to understand change processes in aged care facilities.  I'm very happy to say that the paper won a highly commented student paper award at the conference (there were two awards for this, and my colleague Ning Wang from the same lab won the other commendation award!).  You can download a pdf of the full paper on complex adaptive systems as a model for assessing organisational change of the introduction of health information systems, and a slidecast of the actual presentation is below:

Complex Adaptive Systems as a Model for Evaluating Organisational Change Caused by the Introduction of Health Information Systems

View more presentations from singingfish.

The first of the presentations shows some metodology I've developed to visualise sociological data through concept maps, using existing sociological theories as a basis (post-modern developments of grounded theory - Situational Analysis and Institutional Ethnography).  There's no paper associated with this one, but you can read see the slides below (but no audio this time):

Methods to understand patterns of adoption of an electronic nursing documentation system in residential aged care facilities

View more presentations from singingfish.

All of this seems to be working out quite well. I talked to some people interested in health simulation modeling, and social network theory, as applied to health IT, and the emphasis on fairly hard to assess dynamics makes me think I'm on the right track, at least to an extent.  This was especially so as my initial contact with the health simulation guy was after I'd presented my sociological methods, and the social network theory discussion was due to a chance encounter over an early lunch.

The second of the presentations outlines the preliminary results from the analytic framework I'm developing.  This is very underdeveloped at the moment, so I'm not going to put it up here.

.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:29:43 GMT

Kieren Diment's Home in Cyberspace

I'm currently a PhD student in the School of Information Systems at Wollongong University working on change management issues arising from the introduction of electronic nursing documentation in aged care facilities.  My supervisors are  Dr Ping Yu and Dr Karin Garrety.  Prior to undertaking this fairly major project in industrial sociology, I worked in the school of Management and Marketing for around 5 years .  Here I worked on research in government/academic/industry innovation systems, knowledge management and social marketing.  Before that I was a research neuropsychologist in Sydney, and before the Scottish weather got to me too much, Glasgow.  I've also dabbled in molecular biology and conservation biology. 

I've taught statistics, computing, psychology and biology at undergraduate level, and individual tuition for statistics at postgraduate level (Masters and PhD) for students of psychology, social marketing and medicine.

I am a competent computer nerd  - I program in Perl (best language ever!), R (statistical computing) and Javascript (when I have to).  I'll use other languages too, if necessary, but usually Perl does everything I need (I even use it to write programs in other languages occasionally).

My quantitative research skills are very strong, and I have substantial expertise in psychometric theory and assessment.  The point of my doing a PhD using mainly qualitative research methods (from my point of view rather than the project's) is to get me as comfortable using and applying qualitative methods as I currently using statistical techniques.  This will make me a fully well-rounded researcher.

Oh yes, last thing.  I wrote the software for this site (on behalf of the People and Organisations Research Centre in the Faculty of Commerce at Wollongong), to take maximum advantage of the kind of web publishing technology provided for individuals in university environments.  This is generally very  reliable, but also extremely limited.  The source code for the software that publishes this site is here .