Social Science Project Management | EthnoNotes

Chinese | Español | Italiano |

Home

FEATURES & BENEFITS

FEATURES & BENEFITS

Key Features and Benefits
Features	Benefits
Easy To Use	Minimal learning curve—fast progress toward mastery of all EthnoNotes system power
Cost-Effective	Nothing to buy, install, or maintain—your browser and Internet access is all you need
Team-Oriented	Seamless collaboration—all data and system functionality are available to all team members in real time
EthnoNotes Security Center	Project administrators have comprehensive and dynamic control over team member access and system privileges
Dynamic Code Tree	Your hierarchical code system is easy to create and includes integrated scaling options and a continuous and dynamic ability to modify the code system and application
Easy Excerpting	Coding and scaling excerpted text is simple and the Excerpt Manager provides for seamless flow between excerpts and their source context
Data Center	Quickly analyze your coded excerpt text with powerful menu-driven filtering, sorting, tabulation, and charting features—ready to export in your choice of format
Training Center	Complete support for training team members to code and rate excerpts—set the standard, then test and evaluate your trainees
Data Security	Complete data security with password protection, industry standard encryption and data back-up

Easy To Use

Right from the start, you’ll find EthnoNotes to be easy, logical, attractive, and supportive. If you have a browser, it’s very likely your computer already has absolutely everything you need to unleash its power. Working with EthnoNotes will come as naturally as navigating the typical Web site, but this time the information is yours! EthnoNotes is intuitive and inviting, encouraging you to make full use of its cutting-edge features. The learning process is easy and intuitive, and you’ll soon be fully immersed in doing the actual work EthnoNotes is there to help you do. To further support you, EthnoNotes includes a comprehensive user guide to assist you with all system tasks at hand as well as intelligent reminders to make sure you use every feature to its fullest. Answers to FAQs and additional support can be found in the EthnoNotes Help Center.

Cost-Effective

Because EthnoNotes is an entirely web-based tool, there’ll never be anything to install and you’ll never need to upgrade to have the latest features EthnoNotes has to offer. Likewise, your data remains at all times secure—safely mirrored, backed-up, and protected according to the highest industry standards. You’ll never worry about computer theft, disk failure, memory loss, file corruption, or any of the other problems that can plague your own computer and result in the loss of your valuable work.

For one low monthly fee, create an EthnoNotes account for yourself, get your project set up, and arrange for any number of users to access your data. At the conclusion of a project, you select how to download your data to your own computer for final storage. EthnoNotes will archive your data for two years thereafter at no additional cost.

Collaboration and Workflow

While the individual user won’t miss out on anything the system has to offer, EthnoNotes was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of multi-member project teams. Your project data and system features are available to all of your authorized team users—simultaneously and dynamically. Regardless of where your team members work or travel, the only thing they need to fully participate in your project is access to the Internet, a browser, and appropriate passwords that the project administrator provides and controls.

Security Center

The Security Center provides your designated project administrator with a granular level of control over every aspect of each team member’s privileges. You can readily create user groups to quickly control which project tasks can be viewed, explored, and modified by any team member, and the work of each can be isolated and monitored.

Dynamic Code Tree

The EthnoNotes code-tree is incredibly flexible. Newly-created codes can expand the system horizontally or vertically, code definition and exemplar information can be accessed with a click of the mouse, and you own rating, ranking, and/or weighting systems can be defined and attached with ease. The code-tree is also fully dynamic in its functionality. At any time you can modify the tree by simply dragging and dropping a particular code from one branch of the tree to another and all the work you’ve done up to that point with that code follows it! EthnoNotes will also save earlier coding, so you retain a history of your work.

Excerpting Made Easy

Easy excerpting (i.e., marking a section of text from an interview, notes, focus group, or other source document) is at the heart of EthnoNotes. Once marked, excerpts can be titled, described in a memo, and assigned any number of codes (and a rating based on each code’s associated scaling). You can move seamlessly between your source documents and the excerpt manager, and you can imaginatively explore your excerpting and coding through a variety of color-coded options available in the document browser. For example, excerpts on a topic (fathering, reading to a child, attitudes about a product, a health belief) throughout an interview or fieldnotes are marked and can then be coded and viewed separately or in combination with other specified excerpts.

Data Center

If the Excerpt Manager is the heart of EthnoNotes, the Data Center is its brain. The EthnoNotes Data Center enables you to imaginatively and efficiently examine how your codes have been applied to your project documents and excerpts using our unique report generator. Like what you see? Prepare and output results to your desktop on the fly—and it’s easy and quick to revise and recreate the output if you’d like to make any changes.

Numerical and graphical views of code system application, code co-occurrence within excerpts, and code-by-descriptor correlations reveal conceptual relationships that would not be apparent through typical resource and excerpt browsing.

Intuitive and powerful filtering via Boolean operators and sorting features allow easy examination of results from any number of perspectives. Narrow a list of excerpts based on any combination of filters (e.g., by resource, user, participant demographic, code, or quantitative data on individuals or groups) and move seamlessly back and forth between the results, your excerpts, and your documents.

Training Center

The EthnoNotes Training Center is a unique and easy-to-use feature which streamlines the systematic establishment of inter-rater reliability. Your code system represents the conceptual framework you have adopted to understand and communicate your findings to others. Demonstrating reliable application of this system to your data is fundamental to the strength and believability of the arguments you present to your audience.

In the EthnoNotes Training Center, project leaders prepare training sessions by setting the standards for code application and code rating on exemplar excerpts. This exemplar work becomes the basis for training and evaluating new project members.

Your staff then “train” online and can demonstrate their level of coding proficiency based on the designated excerpts. They can perform these exercises independently—without the need for direct monitoring by team leaders.

Inter-rater reliability is reported using Fleiss’s modification of Cohen’s Kappa Coefficient for inter-rater reliability and, where appropriate, percent agreement between the expert and trainee ratings. Results include not only the level of proficiency demonstrated by each user in comparison with the project standard, but also provide great detail for identifying where and what additional training would be required, including item-by-item comparison.

Security

Your data and analytic work reside safely on our ultra-secure servers for the duration of your project, but we never forget who the owner is. Export any of your project data from any place in the system with a simple select-and-click. All data are exported in common data file formats and can be readily imported into the software you already own and are comfortable using. Your data, in the forms you want, are always at your fingertips, ready for use in your reports, your papers, and the class or conference room.