Qualitative Homework Related

Update: This I got form Vimalakumar S

Dear Professor,


This is in response to the blog entry regarding Qualitative Homework and use of Software tools to count words.

I have two issues to discuss here: -

1. I find equating all open ended questions and their answers as qualitative inputs as erroneous. Just because the survey question did not restrict the responses to a few choices does not make the inputs qualitative. Another proof of this fact is that most of us who attempted the assignment were inclined to count the recurring words rather than read and understand what the consumer was saying. In my opinion, if you can reduce the data collected onto a frequency distribution chart it is no longer qualitative. May be the survey should have limited the answer choices based on an prior understanding of possible responses.


2. Related issue would the question of “How to analyse qualitative inputs?”. And in my opinion, counting words is not the answer. The researcher seeks qualitative questioning to understand the consumer in a manner better than what a simple quantitative question would convey. To analyse the inputs and take in all its richness we need a better tool than a frequency distribution chart of recurring words.

Regards,

Vimal

My take: Sure. Qualitative info for qualitative understanding has its own importance and we're yet to find a better way than expert analysis for that one. However, when open-endeds are used the way they are in surveys, some attempt at categorization (and thereby dimension reduction) is not a bad idea. Thanks, for writing in and sharing your thoughts.

Update: Session 6 related.
The quant portion has started. Expectedly there have been a few hiccups, esp in the absence of SPSS. Hopefully session 7 will fare smoother than this. I shall resend a slide deck as an addendum to session 6 slides with material that may have been missed in one section or the other. The slide deck will pointedly include R code, instructions and screen caps.

Hi All,

The session 5 homework relatring to some preliminary analysis of open-endeds qualitative data I take was quite challenging.

I would expect folks to take a straightforward common-sensical approach : Take a random sample of some, say, 100 odd responses and analyze them assuming they represent the rest of the responses for the purposes of the homework. Use of excel functions like FIND() etc. would be par for this course.

However, like always happens with homeworks, some have gone further, gone creative or gone haywire in coming up with new approaches to this problem.

Below I present what one student did from his email:

Hey Professor,


I used the following two tools to answer the Qualitative research homework and try and make sense of the mounds of data provided to us and figure out the top reasons :

1.) Word Frequency : http://writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp

2.) Phrase Frequency : http://writewords.org.uk/phrase_count.asp

Of course, I had to figure out the correct number of words to use in the phrase, but after that, it made it much easier to consume the raw data of the survey. There are many more tools which also do this, but this was the first result from Google :).

I was initially planning to build a word cloud and highlight the most common words, but I gave that up after I realized that words like "I" and "had" were the most frequent.

Regards,
Shyam Seshadri

Thanks, Shyam.
 
I'd very much like to hear if you've used something new or creative. Shall put it up on the blog here. Pls use the comments space below for Q&A.