🌻 Introduction to data collection with Qualia
Chapter contents.

Qualia is our AI interviewer.

You can use Qualia to collect data for causal mapping: Task 1 — Introduction. You can use it for other kinds of data collection too.

In-depth interviews, automated.

QualiaInterviews (white background) (Small)

Go beyond questionnaires and “free text” answers. Find out what people are really thinking, in their own words:

  • What worked and why?
  • What didn’t work, and why?
  • What new issues are emerging?

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How does it work?

  1. Design and test your Qualia interview online.
  2. Send your respondents a link to the interview.
  3. Your respondents click on the link. Our friendly AI-interviewer guides them through the whole interview. They can type or speak their answers.
  4. Get an automated report. Or download the transcripts for further analysis.

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If you want to know what buttons to press for setting up, sharing and managing your interviews, look at the Qualia technical documentation.

This chapter (which is a constant work in progress) gives you the background:

Pages in this Chapter
AI interviewing has potential – scalability, reach, reproducibility, causality

Qualitative approach: These procedures approach the stakeholders and their stories as far as possible without preconceived templates, to remain open to emerging and unexpected changes in respondents’ causal landscapes.

Our paper on an inductive workflow to gather and analyse evidence at scale.

Our method comprised the following steps (following Tasks 1-3 according to Powell, Copestake, et al. (2023, p. 108-112):

Case study – our 'seamless stories' workflow in practice

At Causal Map we're thrilled because our seamless AI-supported workflow is finally coming together. Recently we helped colleagues at a University in Chile to complete a qualitative, explorative evaluation of the impact of a programme, using our automated interviewer Qualia to conduct the interviews and Causal Map to make sense of them.

Case study – Qualia asks about USA problems, again

How can we capture and visualise people’s mental models of a complex situation like the state of a nation? This week, as part of an EES webinar demonstrating our automated AI interviewer Qualia, we asked the participants to spend a few minutes being interviewed about problems facing the USA and the reasons for them, and the reasons for the reasons. Over 90 people did, with a mean of 13 messages per conversation. Details below.

How Qualia copes with different languages

There are two things to think about:

  • 🎤 the transcription service (necessary only if we enable the option for people to speak instead of type)
  • 👩🏼‍🔬 the AI interviewer service which provides interviewer responses.