Paraphrases are summaries of individual sections of your data, written in your own words. MAXQDA makes it easy to write paraphrases for sections of text, image segments, and video and audio clips and then categorize these paraphrases in order to systematize and group them. These paraphrase functions can be used to work systematically with summaries of text sections and the formation of categories. Paraphrasing is often carried out within the framework of qualitative content analysis: it is used especially in the exploration of data and as the basis for inductive category development (Kuckartz, 2014, Mayring, 2015, Schreier, 2012). But paraphrasing is useful in general whenever you need only to summarize the important contents of a text, e.g. when a journalist paraphrases the key statements of an interview.
Both, paraphrases and summaries, can be used to summarize content, but they have very different applications and requirements. The following research blog article gives an extensive overview of the difference between paraphrases and summaries:
Paraphrasing and Teamwork
If you’re working in a team and have split the documents to be paraphrased between your team members, you can use MAXQDA's Teamwork functions (in the "Home" tab) to either merge two projects (with different documents that contain paraphrases) or to transfer paraphrases between projects (that already contain the same documents).
