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.

You can find new peers by clicking on the “Search” button in the “Your Peers” section of the Dashboard. This brings you to the “Peer Directory and Search” page, where you can show or hide the peer search filters.

• Leaving the search field blank allows you into a general PCAT directory.
• Alternately, you can enter the specialization key word(s) of a potential peer you might want to work with, or an affiliation, to narrow the PCAT user base search.
  

Once you find the potential peers you wish to work with in the Peer Directory, click on the “Send Peer Request” button.

The next time that PCAT user logs on, she or he will see a “Peer Request” in the Notifications section of their Dashboard. Requests for peers to browse, search or code a dataset also appear under Notifications on the Dashboard. Once the peer request is accepted, that peer will show up in your “Available Coders” list as well as your “Manage Permissions” list. You will then be able to assign that person to browse and search your archives as well as code your datasets. Initially, only the person who uploads an archive, the “Archive Owner” can assign peers to perform coding. However, the Archive Owner also has the option to share search, browse, and dataset creation privileges with their peers.

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” and then “Create New Peer Group”. 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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© 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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