How To Work With QInsights — SMART

From Overwhelmed to Insightful: How One Research Team Used QInsights to Skip Coding and Still Go Deep

Interview transcripts piling up. A looming deadline. And the familiar dread of spending weeks in manual coding.

That’s where a group of education researchers found themselves—tasked with analyzing 60 interviews and think-aloud protocols to understand how physical education teachers choose and learn to use digital tools. Traditionally, they would have coded all the data manually. Instead, they tried something new: a human-AI collaboration using QInsights.

Their goal? Not just speed, but quality—insights that mattered.

Letting the AI Open the Door—But Not Take Over

They began with QInsights’ Theme Analysis, letting the tool scan the data and surface possible categories. These were compared with established theoretical frameworks, then refined and challenged by the research team. The AI helped spark ideas and retrieve examples, but the team stayed in control.

They soon realized something important: the best results didn’t come from getting the perfect prompt. They came from engaging with the AI’s suggestions, asking follow-up questions, and thinking with the AI—not instead of it.

What They Discovered

• They found new angles—like “trust” and “risk”—that weren’t part of their original theory.

• They could compare interview cohorts more easily by structuring memos and validating patterns via targeted AI prompts.

• They skipped traditional coding altogether—but still arrived at a deep, nuanced understanding of the data.

The team saved significant time without sacrificing analytical depth. And perhaps most importantly: they felt empowered, not replaced.

Co-Intelligence in Action: You Lead, AI Supports

With QInsights, you don’t just save time—you tap into something much bigger.
You're drawing on the digital traces of countless lifeworlds—reflections of meaning-making across cultures, contexts, and conversations.

This is no black box.
Unlike generic chatbots, QInsights lets you trace every answer back to your data, grounding insights in real evidence—not hallucinations.

The AI doesn’t replace you. But it accelerates the work, opens new angles, and helps you see more—faster.

Want to explore how this works for your own project?
👉 Register for your free trial now

Warm regards,

Susanne

🕮 If you are interested in reading the full story, it will be published in our forthcoming book Qualitative Data Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: Theory, Methods and Practice (Susanne Friese and David Morgan, eds.). SAGE Publications. To be published in 2026 (Sorry, this is still a while, but book publishing is slow)

Dr. Susanne Friese
Rebel Methodologist
Founder of Qeludra and Co-Founder of QInsights