For 30+ years, we’ve used CAQDAS tools to organise our data. But GenAI represents a fundamental shift: from structuring our analysis to conversing with an AI that generates interpretations for us. This creates urgent questions:
The integration of Generative AI into qualitative research represents not a technical upgrade, but a fundamental rupture. For three decades, CAQDAS tools helped researchers structure and organise data.
GenAI does something different: it converses, interprets, and generates meaning.
This transformation exposes a long-hidden vulnerability. Qualitative methodology has historically prioritised data collection over the formalisation of analytical reasoning. Most researchers were never taught how analysis works; they learned templates and software features, not the underlying logic. Now, as AI offers instant interpretations, this gap becomes dangerous.
The Core Challenge:
A methodologically “weak” researcher cannot effectively partner with a rhetorically “strong” AI. Without understanding the fundamentals of analytical thinking, researchers risk becoming passive consumers of
AI-generated insights are outsourcing sense-making to algorithms.
Our Proposal:
We aim to discuss how three complementary ideas and approaches intersect. The first draws on Ian Dey’s systematic procedures for qualitative analysis—classifying, linking, and connecting. The second brings in a complexity-informed approach to social science methodology, attending to emergence, non-linearity, and context-dependence. The third engages with a philosophy-of-science perspective on causal evidence, integrating variational and mechanistic reasoning. Together, these three orientations provide a basis for positioning AI as a “Sense-Making Agent” rather than a mere tool. This means, among other things, that researchers must validate AI suggestions through mechanistic reasoning and reflexive judgment—exercising a profound critical attitude and sustained engagement with AI in qualitative methods.
Workshop Goals:
This is not about resisting AI; it’s about ensuring human scholarship remains its sovereign architect.
Elif Kus Saillard
Lasse Gerrits
Judith Schoonenboom
If you are interested in attending this event, please send an email including a short motivation to Federica Russo or Elif Kus Saillard, before 31 March.
Federica Russo is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Techno-Science at Utrecht University and External Faculty Member at IAS. She has long-standing interest in methods in the sciences. At IAS, Federica has organised several seminar series and events in the area of health complexity and mixed methods research.