In this video, I explain how to use AI Assist from MaxQda to build your code list and code your documents.
This video is part of a 4-videos series on AI Assist, be sure to check all videos: Introduction to AI Assist, Automatic Transcription, Summarising with AI Assist, and Coding with AI Assist!
The text below is the video script.
AI Assist can help you to build your code list and code your documents in two ways.
- The first one is by suggesting codes and subcodes that you can create,
- the second one is suggesting extracts of your document to be coded with a specific code.
Let’s see these two options in more details!
Ask AI Assist to suggest new codes for your code list / your code system
This is from the document browser window:
- you can select some text, like an answer from an interview,
- then, from the context menu “Suggest new code for selected text”,
- now AI Assist is going to provide code suggestions, and explanations (about why this suggestion),
- you can tick what you want to keep,
- then it’s gong to be created, and the explanation will be in the code memo!
Ask AI Assist to suggest subcodes to an existing code
This is from the Code system window:
- just select your code,
- you can ask for a list of example for each subcode, if you want,
- and the suggestions are going to be displayed in the code memo.
Note that you have to do the “creating subcodes” and “coding” parts yourself, at least for now.
Ask AI Assist to suggest extracts to be coded with a specific code
This is from the document browser. This is for now “Beta”, but should be released soon.
- It’s done from the context menu of an extract, or from the toolbar.
- You have to pick a code, and for this to work, there should be a description of the code, so, AI Assist knows what to look for.
- Then the coding suggestions are made straight by coding extracts in your document. So AI Assist is going to code the extracts that could be a good match. But it’s going to code them with an AI Assist code. This way, you can check and confirm (or reject) the suggestion.
- If you reject the suggestion, just delete the code.
- If you agree, keep it, and once you’ve checked everything, you can either keep them in this AI code, or you can move these coded extracts in the proper code. To move the coded extracts in the top code, just click “mover segments” from the AI code, and then “paste segments” in your code.
To conclude, a word of caution
This is all very promising, but the use of AI in research is a fairly recent development, and we need to keep a critical eye on it.
Mostly, we need to keep in mind that, like all tools … it is the user of the tool who is going determine whether the results are satisfactory or not, not the tool itself. It’s up to the user, it’s up to you to make informed, ethical and robust use of the tool. And it’s up to the you to judge the results obtained with the tool.
In short, it’s like a research assistant: it’s here to assist in your project, but in the end, it’s up to you to give the right instructions and the right objectives, and it’s your responsibility to evaluate the results, and see if they are robust enough!
🧑‍🏫 If you need help with MaxQda or your research project, or if you want more information, you can: