CAQDAS stands for:
Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis software. NUD.IST and The Ethnograph are specific examples of such software. I prefer Atlas/ti for most things. All are designed to help social researchers deal with the analysis of 'qualitative data'/'textual data'/'non-numerical data'. I tend to use these in combination with tools such as WordSmith and various KWIC systems. I can then link the social science interpretations of the data with finer grained linguistics etc.
The best review site is at:
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/caqdas/
which also has downloads of demos and a bibilography.
Sim.
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/caqdas/
Dr. Simeon J. Yates
Lecturer in Social Sciences
Discipline Of Sociology
Faculty Of Social Sciences
Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
UK
Telephone: +44 1908 654508
Fax: +44 1908 654488
s.j.yates@open.ac.uk
http://socsci.open.ac.uk/simeon/simeon_yates.html