Is this for you? If you're at least a bit familiar with qualitative coding and Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) as a way of making sense of texts, but you're not yet convinced that causal mapping is a really interesting twist on that, or you've never even heard of causal mapping, this short series on causal QDA is for you! Plus, we are now making available a new version of our software for exploring causal mapping which is free for core functionality.

The fact that causal coding can be largely reduced to a series of low-level tasks makes it very suitable for automation with AI. High precision and recall scores can be achieved. (Consolidating a large number of in-vivo labels can be accomplished mostly automatically with clustering of text embeddings.)

This interesting article [@frieseConversationalAnalysisAI2025] proposes a methodological shift for qualitative data analysis (QDA) that moves beyond traditional coding by introducing Conversational Analysis with AI (CAAI). This approach can be realised by using Dr. Friese's own software, QInsights, replacing the process of coding -- segmenting and labelling data -- with a structured, dialogic interaction between the researcher and a large language model (LLM).