Thanks go out to Barry Edwards, who forwarded his organization’s (Center for Legal Solutions) collection of Practical Research on Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Word counts can make for an interesting perspective on a set of qualitative data. Take Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech. There’s the straightforward way of representing the results, just giving a summary table with word use totals.
Here’s a segment of the report generated from the open-source qualitative data analysis tool, [...]

Microsoft has an intriguing tool in development that predicts the demographics of different search phrases. For example, what are the predicted demographics of folks searching for the term mediation?
Here’s what the tool reports:

And here’s how the demographics compare between those searching for “attorney” versus those searching for “mediator”:

The data that fuels the prediction comes [...]

Does it ever seem like you just don’t get a whole lot done in December? The year is winding down, many folks are celebrating holidays, whatever. Well, for whatever reasons, it seems like states have recently been slacking off in December as well, at least when it comes to both starting and ending [...]