Tools, learning and bespoke tool development
Deep Qualitative Insights, Made Practical.
QualDeep Insights empowers researchers, students, and practitioners to engage confidently with qualitative research — through privacy-first, client-side digital tools, interactive learning resources, and bespoke tool development. Making qualitative analysis methods more accessible, ethical, and intuitive from the very beginning.
§ 01 · The approach
Analysis that keeps you in control
QualDeep's tools run entirely in your browser, and they span two ways of working. CISA Narrative reads a prepared transcript and detects critical incidents automatically — through explicit, rule-based linguistic and narrative analysis — and lets you override, reassign or annotate every classification by hand. The Open Coders work the other way round: you code fully by hand, applying your own emergent labels, while the tool organises and searches what you build. In both, the interpretation is yours; detection, where it happens at all, reports rather than decides, and nothing you work on ever leaves your device.
Always vanilla
HTML, CSS and JavaScript only. No external libraries, no build step, no dependencies that change beneath you.
Client-side only
All analysis runs inside your browser. Transcripts never travel to a server — the only durable record is the files you export.
Accessible by design
WCAG 2.1 AA as a founding constraint, not a retrofit — and colour never carries research meaning unless it is colour-blind-safe.
§ 02 · The flagship
CISA Narrative
CISA Narrative reads a prepared transcript and surfaces the moments where a speaker is actively doing identity work — what the method calls a critical incident. It maps the structural oppositions inside and across those moments, classifies their affective quality on the Harmonious–Critical scale, and lays out the narrative arc of the whole interview. Detection is automatic and rule-based, and every classification can be overridden, reassigned or annotated by hand: the tool reports, the analyst interprets. A licence is required.
Its companion, the optional CISA Narrative Template Enhancer, turns your own coded material into a bespoke coding framework that Narrative reads directly — so the analysis reflects your project's bespoke categories rather than its fixed template. It is licensed alongside Narrative.
The free CISA Narrative Learning Guide documents the whole method with worked figures, and the CISA methodology site sets out the analytical framework, worked examples and the position paper in depth.
§ 03 · Open coding
Open Coder and Explorer
The Open Coder is for fully manual open coding of a single transcript: you apply your own emergent labels by hand, and its Explorer searches what you have built with Boolean queries — AND, OR, NOT, phrases and brackets — showing you in plain English how each query will read before it runs. It is a complimentary tool from QualDeep — free to use, and licensed for use rather than redistribution.
§ 04 · In development
Open Coding: Focus Group Interviews
A focus-group open coder and explorer — the same fully manual approach extended to multi-speaker focus-group data — is in development, and will join the suite when ready. Unlike the single-transcript Open Coder, it will be a licensed tool.
§ 05 · Preparation
TranscriptReady
TranscriptReady prepares interview and focus-group transcripts for every QualDeep tool: speaker labelling, cleaning, and a single export format the whole suite accepts. It works session-only — nothing persists in your browser, and it warns you before you leave with unexported work. Your exports are the record.
TranscriptReady is supplied as part of the CISA Narrative bundle: it comes with a CISA Narrative licence rather than being offered as a standalone free tool.
§ 06 · Learning
Interactive Research Methods Learning WebApps
The Research Methods Interactive Learning WebApps cover postgraduate research methods — research literacy and design, qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis for small studies — in the browser. Each teaches through doing, turning reading into practice, for readers from complete beginners to doctoral students. Like the tools, they run client-side in vanilla code, so nothing leaves your device.
§ 07 · Publications
Publications
Prevett, P. (2026). Theory-Operationalising Tool Co-Creation: Building Methodology-Specific Analysis Tools Through Human-AI Collaboration. A Position Statement for Qualitative Research Methodology. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-27.2.4596
Further conference and journal papers, on the tools and on research-methods pedagogy, are forthcoming and in press; the full list is on the About page.
§ 08 · Testimonials
What researchers say
[Testimonials from researchers using the tools will appear here — placeholder, none collected yet.]
§ 09 · Access
How to access the resources
CISA Narrative and its Template Enhancer are licensed annual subscriptions, and TranscriptReady comes with them as part of the CISA Narrative bundle. The forthcoming Open Coder and Explorer for Focus Groups will be licensed too. The single-transcript Open Coder and Explorer is complimentary and free to use, and the CISA Narrative Learning Guide is public. Licensing opens with the October 2026 launch.
§ 10 · About and contact
About the developer
Pauline Prevett is a Reader in Education at the University of Manchester, where she leads PhD research training in the School of Environment, Education and Development. She teaches research methods on several postgraduate programmes, and her research focuses on students' financial identity and financial self-efficacy, and on qualitative and mixed methods research methodology.
Get in touch
For licensing, collaboration, or a bespoke qualitative analysis tool built to your methodology, contact Pauline Prevett. Full contact details are on the About page.