I’m not tech-savvy enough to give you an expert opinion. But I know some people who are, and who actually work on developing QualCoder, and they are very concerned about privacy and data security – hence, I believe that it is safe. Also, QualCoder runs locally on your computer and doesn’t require a connection to the internet, so nobody should be able to access your data remotely without (or even with) your consent. But anonymising your data before importing it into QualCoder (or any QDA software) is a good idea, either way. Interestingly, there have recently been added some (optional) AI features to QualCoder (using OpenAI’s GPT). That does raise a few questions regarding data security. These features do upload some of your data to OpenAI’s servers (as well as Amazon’s AWS) for analysis – but again, security has been taken very seriously, and most of the data is processed locally, without sharing it with any party over the internet. A lot of (probably most) commercial QDA software with AI features is far less secure in this regard. So, if you’re interested in using AI in research and concerned about security, QualCoder is certainly one of the better choices. And even if you aren’t, I think it’s still more trustworthy than commercial software. More on reddit.com

One app that has definitely helped me - and helped others outside anthro, I'm sure - is a good citation manager. Zotero is a wonderful tool! Off the top of my head, organizing and collecting fieldnotes can be time consuming or tedious. Something that could scan, organize, and annotate or provide space to annotate handwritten and typed notes might be really handy! More on reddit.com

You can include open ended responses as variables alongside things like categorical, scale, or binary responses. For work where you don't need those, you might drop them to make memory less of an issue. You can do things like data cleaning on the open ended responses with a number of R tools. There are also a number of R packages for text analysis if you actually want to model the responses. You'll probably want to just do keyword sorting with regex to start, which R is great at. For models, you're probably going to end up doing some sort of dictionary based analysis. Quanteda package may be useful. More on reddit.com

Here’s a good list with links: https://www.etsu.edu/its/rcs/services/datamanagement/qda.php More on reddit.com