Deliberate Q

Deliberate Q is a visualisation tool for Q Methodology analysis. It is also being developed for use in deliberative reasoning analysis (deliberative reasoning index; DRI), which involves combining Q data with additional data in the form of ranked policy or action options, where the Q items embody the relevant concourse informing decisions regarding choices to be made about "what should be done". (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1O0u6E9W28)

But it can easily be used as a dedicated tool for Q analysis as well.

It is a java swing application with these features:

• Principal Components Analysis
• Centroid Method
• Factor rotations manually or using standard algorithms (Varimax, Orthomax etc)
• Rotation graphs
• Animated "intersubjective consistency" graphs for visualisation of multi stage data
• Venn Diagram views for factor interpretation

Getting started

Download the latest release jar from Releases and run it as below:

java -jar deliberate-q-2.1-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Build instructions

You need to have Java (Oracle or OpenJDK) and Maven 3+ installed.

To build the jar with all dependencies included:

mvn clean install

This writes the jar file to the target directory and you can run the application like this (from that directory):

java -jar deliberate-q-2.0.8-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Or to compile the source, run the unit tests and then run the application from the command line using maven:

mvn test exec:java

How to release a new version

For project administrators, to build a release (tagged in git source control) on Linux/Unix:

./release.sh VERSION_HERE

Mathematics libraries

T distribution routines from apache commons-math are used in the calculation of factor scores.

Jama is used for eigenvalue decomposition in Principal Components Analysis.

View and run the project in GitPod

https://gitpod.io/#/github.com/DeliberativeAnalysis/DeliberateQ