CONTENT ANALYSISin any one cell, the text of each individual’s entire
response to a question can be placed in a spread-
sheet cell, thus capturing both the closed-ended
and open-ended data for a survey into a conven-
ient, single spreadsheet for researchers to analyze.
With the survey data in this convenient form,
researchers can then code open-ended responses
manually, putting their assigned codes in addition-
al spreadsheet columns. As a teaching exercise, it
is instructive to assign students a task such as
identifying gender differences among a thousand
responses to a broad open-ended question, such as
a question asking respondents’ views about peace
or family values. Students first might sort the
spreadsheet by gender in order to read separately
samples of male responses and female responses
and obtain a sense of what possible gender differ-
ences exist. They then develop coding instructions
that capture these differences and apply the codes
to the entire set of responses. This coding, of
course, is better done without knowledge of the
respondents’ genders, with responses in a random
order, and on different respondents than those
used to develop the codes. After coding several
hundred responses, however, students usually be-
gin to glaze over and soon the most ardent human-
ist student is asking whether the computer could
possibly be of help in assigning codes.
For some kinds of coding, computer help is
indeed available in the form of computer pro-
grams that assign codes. Such codings can be
treated as advisory and then manually confirmed,
augmented perhaps by also assigning a weight. Or
they may be used as is after being spot-checked for
accuracy. Not only can a computer complete huge
amounts of tedious coding in minutes, possibly
assigning many different types of codings to each
text, but these codings may uncover statistically
significant frequency differences that human coders
would not uncover, if only because computer analy-
sis is so even-handed and untiring. The static
created by occasional miscodings may be more
than offset by gains from a reliable consistency in
making many codings.
Computer coding assignments are usually based
on the occurrence of words, particular senses of
words, or multiword idioms appearing in the text.
For example, the word ‘‘father’’ in a text might be
coded as ‘‘male,’’ ‘‘family member,’’ etc. as well as
possibly ‘‘authority-role.’’ Computer content-analy-
sis software may search the contexts of words in
the text to ferret out and correctly code common
word senses. For example, for a national study of
people’s perceptions of African-American young
males on several open-ended questions, it was
particularly important for the computer to identi-
fy correctly each respondent’s usages of such mul-
ti-meaning words as ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘white,’’ ‘‘black,’’ and
‘‘color.’’In addition to developing their own coding
categories, researchers may enlist existing com-
puter-scored categories that are relevant to the
task at hand. For example, it might be hypothe-
sized that one group being studied is more opti-
mistic and its responses will reflect more ‘‘positive
thinking’’ while another is more negative or pessi-
mistic. To code ‘‘positive thinking’’ a researcher
may want the computer to apply an existing con-
tent-analysis category that includes over 1200 words,
word roots, word senses, phrasal verbs, and idi-
oms, thus essentially covering most expressions of
‘‘positive-thinking’’ that occur as infrequently as
three times per million words of ordinary English
text. A similar category exists for negative-think-
ing, allowing the investigator to check whether the
groups being studied differ in their coded positive
thinking, negative thinking, or both. And by enlist-
ing such standard categories, the results obtained
in one study can be readily compared with results
found in other studies.Once data has been captured in a convenient
format for computer use, they can be repeatedly
analyzed. For example, should our now glazed-
over students have any energy left after analyzing
the responses by gender, they could be given an
additional assignment of identifying and coding
rural-urban differences in these same open-ended
responses. Given so many analyses that can be
made, it makes sense to let the computer do what it
can, saving manual labor for those types of codings
that would be hard to have a computer assign.
Even multimedia qualitative-analysis software such
as HyperResearch includes some rudimentary tools
for automatic assignments.Moreover, desktop computer software has al-
so become available that identifies patterns in text
without having to develop coding categories. For
example, SPSS’s TextSmart uses an algorithm that