focus on unstructured and non-numerical data. Qualitative data include fieldnotes, open questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, participant-observation, audio or video recordings in natural settings, documents of various kinds (publicly available or personal, paper-based or electronic records that are already available or elicited by the researcher), and even material artefacts.

The use of these data is informed by various methodological or philosophical frameworks, as part of various methods, such as ethnography, discourse analysis , interpretative phenomenological analysis and other phenomenological methods.

Qualitative research methods have been used in education, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology and social work .

The most common qualitative data analysis software are:

• ATLAS.ti

• Dedoose

• MAXQDA

• NVivo

• QDA MINER