November 2025

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• Introduction to MAXQDA’s components
• Tips for data preparation, transcription, import and organisation
• Data exploration and familiarisation, including AI-assisted summaries and AI-assisted Chat with Documents.
• Coding strategies – inductive, deductive approaches; manual and automated approaches; including AI assisted coding.
• Organising materials to factual characteristics such as socio-demographics (variables) to facilitate interrogation.
• Use of writing and visualisation tools to reflect on data and processes
• Querying and outputting

Course Description

MAXQDA is a powerful software for qualitative and mixed-methods analyses of text, audio, video, survey and social media data. Having integrated generative AI features, the software now offers new possibilities to researchers.

This one-day course provides an overview of MAXQDA’s functionality and explores the latest in MAXQDA’s AI Assist tools.  We consider moments within a qualitative data analysis workflow at which a researcher might lean on these AI tools, and the implications of doing so. 

The course explores what use of these tools might look like within research contexts, encouraging a method-sensitive approach to harnessing generative-AI technologies.

Using a critical lens to think through context-specific adoption of these new technologies, this course focuses on developing appropriate uses of tools to accomplish tasks, cautioning against both indiscriminate use of AI tools and complete abstention of their use.

The course combines discussion, demonstration and hands-on work, including:

• Contextual discussions – developmental, methodological and analytical principles
• Software Overview –interface, architecture, manual & automated tools
• Analytic Planning – ensuring analytic strategies drive the appropriate use of software tools
• Guided Instruction – step-by-step teaching in the operation of MAXQDA and the use of tools for analytic tasks

Participants will work on sample data and the whole group follows common tasks together and practices exercises individually. Work is structured to provide step-by-step support, including project set up, manual and AI-assisted coding and summarising, organising data to key characteristics and interrogating materials.

Please note: This is MAXQDA 2024 course, as this is the first version to contain the AI Assist functionality.  Participants using version 2022 or 2020  are welcome to attend but the main part of the course will cover the functions available for MAXQDA version 2024. The software is the same on Mac and Windows platform. Participants can use the trial version of MAXQDA 2024 to follow the course if they do not yet have a licence: https://www.maxqda.com/trial