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Use PCAT to form a peer network

A peer network allows you to share your analytic work with others. Peer connections are similar to friends on social networking sites like Facebook. When you establish peers, you will have PCAT-based links to trusted collaborators with whom you can share work. For many PCAT users, peer relationships will be extensions of preexisting (or proposed) collaborations in the workplace or school. Peers can also be discovered by searching the Peer Directory by keyword to find other PCAT users who can, based on their credentials, make a contribution to your analytic work.

Finding peers on PCAT

To find peers that already use PCAT,you will need to go to the Peer Directory. The Peer Directory can be reached from your Dashboard by clicking on the Search or Browse our peer directory link on the Dashboard or by clicking on Peer Directory in the Account drop-down menu.

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Peer Directory

Finding a Peer:

By default, the Peer Directory displays all PCAT users with visible profiles in alphabetic order by last name. You can browse this directory page by page or enter search criteria in the search box.
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To narrow your search parameters further, click Show Filters (+) to bring up additional search fields in which you can enter search criteria. Click Search or press enter to have PCAT find and display peers that match your search and have visible profiles.
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Adding a Peer:

Once you find a peer that you would like to add to your network, click on send peer request. If the peer has email notifications turned on, the system will notify them of the peer request by email. The next that PCAT user logs on, they will see a Peer Request in the Notifications section of their Dashboard. Once the peer request is accepted, that peer will show up in your Available Coders list as well as your Manage Permissions list.
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If you have reached your maximum number of peers, you will not be given the option to send peer request. Instead, the system will show you a reminder that you may want to upgrade your account to allow for more peers.
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Can't Find a Peer:

If you can't find a peer that you know is using PCAT, you may have to contact them to have them change their Accounts settings so they show up in the Peer Directory. If they do not wish to set their profile as visible, they can search for you in the Peer Directory and send you a peer request.

You can invite peers that do not currently use PCAT by clicking on Invite your peers to join PCAT! This will take you to an auto-generated invitation email for PCAT with a place to enter up to 20 email address at one time. Just enter the email addresses, one per line, and click Send Bulk Invitations. Once they have joined PCAT, either you or they can search the Peer Directory and send a peer request.
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Managing Your Peers

Click on Manage Peers in the Account drop-down menu to bring up a page listing your current peers. Here you can view information about your peers. Because many PCAT users choose to only share information with people in their network, Peer Management is the place to view that shared personal and professional information.

You can also remove peers from your network on this page by clicking on remove peer. The system will prompt you to make sure you really want to remove the peer. Removing a peer from your network will remove their access to any further interaction with your project(s). Already completed analysis done by this peer will not be removed as long as you don't remove the Peer from the project.

Creating peer groups on PCAT

PCAT also supports the creation of “Peer Groups” which are a sub-set of your full peer network. Peer groups can be created, edited and deleted by clicking on the expansion arrow to the right of the word “Peers” and selecting “Edit Global Peer Groups” or from the Account drop-down menu. You can then “Create New Peer Group” or edit existing ones. For example, might create a peer group for all the coders who work in a office, agency, lab or on a specific project team.

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Most Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I use this system? | Where do I get FDMS bulk downloads? | Does PCAT identify duplicates? | What is QDAP?

© 2009 - 2010 Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), in the University Center for Social and Urban Research, at the University of Pittsburgh, and QDAP-UMass, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As of 2010, PCAT and this PCAT Help Wiki are maintained and improved by personnel from Texifter, LLC, which is a software start-up located in North Amherst & Springfield, MA and online at http://texifter.com/.

Content on this website was made possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation: III-0705566 "Collaborative Research III-COR: From a Pile of Documents to a Collection of Information: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Text Analysis" and IIS-0429293 "Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking." We are also grateful for financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. **Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.** == ==

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