Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide

Abstract

Traditional qualitative data analysis software, while greatly facilitating text analysis, remains entrenched in a tradition of semantic coding. Such an approach, being both time-consuming and poor at incorporating quantitative variables, is seldom applied to large-scale survey and database research (especially within the commercial sector). Lexical analysis, on the other hand, with its origins in linguistics and information technology, offers a more rapid solution for the treatment of texts, capable not only of identifying semantic content but also important structural aspects of language. The automatic calculation of word lexicons and rapid identification of relevant text fragments require an integration of both powerful quantitative analysis and search-and-retrieval tools. Lexical analysis is thus the ideal tool for the exploitation of open-text responses in surveys, offering a bridge between quantitative and qualitative analyses, opening new avenues for research and presentation of textual data.