Main functions of AQUAD Five

• Project: Determine some "default" parameters for the project you are just working with, that is, tell the program to do certain things on a regular basis rather than answering each time, for example, whether you want to include a particular text file into your analysis or where to save the resulats of an action.

• Files: Select or edit a list of all your data files (a "file catalog") and import text files in plain ASCII format from your word processor into the AQUAD environment.

• Coding: Call a text file to the screen and attach codes to the end of the line in which a text segment ("unit of meaning") begins: ONE-STEP CODING. Alternatively, you can start with a print-out of your line-numbered text files: mark beginning and end of relevant text portions, and write a code in the margin. In a second step, the coding information is entered into AQUAD, using line numbers and code names: TWO-STEP CODING. Additionally, you may combine systematically different codes under a more generic meta-code or add short descriptions to the code names in the automatically created master code list.

• Retrieval: Write a list (called "catalog") of all those codes or words of particular interest of particular interest in your data texts. AQUAD will use each single code or word in a catalog, when you choose an appropriate program function like retrieval of code sequences (for example, code overlaps or hierarchical nestings) or counting of code or word frequencies. You can use a word catalogs to create a dicitionary of conceptually related words, synonyms, etc.

• Tables: Apply two-dimensional retrieval strategies. Sometimes you may want to find text segments of a particular code only in those texts for which another critical code is valid. For example, if one of your codes is "male" and another is "female", a third is "vacation" and a fourth is "work", you can tell the program to make a matrix with two columns and two rows. The cells will be filled with the text segments in your data in which men talk about vacation, then those in which they talk about work, then with the text containing women's opinions about vacataions, then their opinions about work.

• Linkages: Specify certain meaningful interrelations of text segments by formulating linkages of more than just two codes in your data texts. Then let the program check whether these linkages occur in the data base or not.

• Implicants: Compare the various cases in your study and group them according to some meaningful criterion. This module applies the procedure of "logical minimization" to a complex configuration of codes appearing in the data base. One of these codes is assumed to be an "outcome" of the configuration of codes which in turn are assumed to represent potential "conditions" or "causes".

• Memos: Note immediately everything that crosses your mind while interpreting a text. When you need your memos again, you can combine retrieval criteria (text number, line numbers, codes, key words, content of the memo text). In case you should have forgotten all of a memo's critical markers, you should at least remember the one or the other critical word from the memo's text.

• View: Gives an overview on text files together with the codes attached to the beginnings of meaningful text segments in an "outline" format, which you know, for example, from file lists in WINDOWS' dialogues. The same view is also accessible from within one-step coding and two-step coding.

• Help: Offers access to general information about AQUAD via a list of contents or of key words. Principally it functins like all help files developed for programs running under WINDOWS. In Addition, most AQUAD windows contain a specific help button on the right side.