ABSTRACT
TEXTBASE ALPHA was originally developed for interviews, but it can handle any kind of qualitative data. It takes advantage of the structure of data to make coding easier. The program’s enhancements are oriented mainly toward numeric manipulations (including a count of all words used in the data documents), which does not distract from the fact that the program performs the main functions of de-contextualization and re-contextualization elegantly. The coding is performed directly on the screen. Unlike other text analysis programs, TEXTBASE ALPHA enables the user to specify the exact beginnings and ends of text segments, rather than just the lines on which a segment starts and stops. Consequently, when retrieved, coded segments are not surrounded by parts of irrelevant sentences.
