Background

The idea behind LiGRE was sparked from a discussion among students. The discussion was about qualitative data analysis software and how convenient it seemed. While everyone involved recognized the potential of such software, they also agreed that it was often too expensive, too difficult to learn, too technologically demanding, or too unreliable for them to use.

It was these considerations that, years later, led us to submit a project to the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to design a new application specialized in qualitative data analysis. Initially called Qualiquan, the project proposed an innovative process for integrating qualitative data analysis and survey results into an intuitive and user-friendly software package accessible to the entire academic community. The best way to achieve all these goals in one fell swoop seemed to be to make it an entirely web-based platform. Another significant advantage of this technological choice was that it would facilitate the development of new and very advantageous features, such as real-time teamwork without synchronization. All these factors combined led to the project coming to fruition in 2014. While our plans had to be reviewed and tweaked many times, the fact remains that LiGRE is still true to our initial aspirations.