Software Development for Ethnographic Res in Drug Abuse

We will develop a comprehensive, multimedia software system to support both qualitative andquantitative ethnographic research. The design of the system builds upon our experience in designingand developing an existing ethnographic data system (AFTER) and on the studies of other availablesystems conducted by our staff. Central to the design will be an integrated multimedia databasecontaining textual, audio and visual data sets. The system will provide support for the coding of dataelements, excerpting related multimedia subsets, and quantitative analyses of coded materials. Thesystem will incorporate an on-line lexicon, baseline coding schema, and ethnographic primer to assistthe researcher.