Feasibility, Opportunities, and Challenges of Utilizing AI for Collaborative Qualitative Analysis

While individual-level AI-assisted analysis has been fairly examined in prior work, AI-assisted collaborative qualitative analysis (CQA) remains an under-explored area of research. After identifying CQA behaviors and design opportunities through interviews, we propose our collaborative qualitative coding tool, CoAIcoder, and present the results of our studies that examine how AI-assisted CQA can work. We then designed a between-subject experiment with 32 pairs of novice users to perform CQA across three commonly practiced phases under four collaboration methods. Our results show that CoAIcoder (with AI & Shared Model) could potentially improve the coding efficiency of CQA, however, with a potential risk of decreasing the code diversity. We also highlight the relationship between independence level and coding outcome, as well as the trade-off between, on the one hand, Coding Time & IRR, and on the other hand Code Diversity. We lastly identified design implications to inspire the future design of CQA systems.