Title: Document and Text Analysis (in field-based research)
1Document and Text Analysis (in field-based
research)
- INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
2Studentship program
- See handout
- Small grants 5000 to do supplemental fieldwork
on consumerization in existing field sites over
the summer, funded by Intel - Ideally for PhD students already in the field
3Outline
Classic Content Analysis
Lightweight Document Analysis
Heavy-duty Document Analysis
Analyzing documents in context
Analyzing the contents of documents in isolation
Systematic collection and analysis of documents
in context in order to define requirements,
improve business processes see Glushko 2005
4Review of Readings
- What accounts for incomplete, badly kept records?
- What is the context within which records are
produced?
5Classic content analysis
6Units and Dimensions
- Syntax vs. Semantics
- Units Words, sentences, paragraphs, articles
- Also, propositional units
- biotechnology, the most recent among post-war
base technologies, enters the public arena in the
1990s - biotechnology enters the public arena in the
1990s - biotechnology is a base technology
- biotechnology is a base technology of the
post-war period - biotechnology is the most recent base
technology - Bauer and Gaskell
7Method
- Sample documents (can even do a random sample)
- Divide documents into units
- syntactical vs. semantic elements
- Articles, words, sentences, themes, propositions
- Construct a coding frame and assign codes to
units - Calculate frequencies
8Word frequency in a 2315-word leaflet on Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome produced by CFS patients
source Prior
Word frequency
Fatigue 55
Chronic 51
Illness 50
Syndrome 46
Research 29
Virus/viral/virology 23
Disease 19
Fibromyalgia 18
Depression 14
Immune/immune-related/immunology 9
Genetic 4
Psychology/psychological 4
Neurology/neurological 4
9Purpose
- Media monitoring construct a continually
updated evaluation frame (an open-system) - Comparisons (between newspapers, between
audiences, against standards) - Construct indices (of societal values) how
people describe themselves and ideal partners in
lonely hearts columns - Bauer and Gaskell
10Document analysis Lightweight
11Projective Interviewing
- Incorporating collected documents into interviews
12Projective Interviewing
J um, I kept the brochure, that said that the
church was changing destinies and taking new
territories and I wondered if you could sort of
explain what that means for the church? M
yeah, um, changing destinies means that
peoplelook at their lives in a particular way.
For example, people who would look at the
patterns in their family and they may say well
all our family, everybody is an alcoholic so Im
more likely to become an alcoholic or people
looking to their families and say that we all
come from very poor backgrounds so we are all
likely to become poor and so you know, they have
a mentality that predates and is based on what
theyve been told
13World Summit on the Information Society
- Content analysis of collected documents
- Combined with other forms of data to make an
argument about inclusiveness
14Document analysis Heavy-Duty
15Documents in business processes - method
- Collect documents (iteratively and according to a
logic of selection) - Create a document inventory
- Classify the documents
- Analyze the inventory
- Contextualize docs in interviews
- Recommendations
source Bob Glushko
16Readings record of medical clinic consultation
- Examining document contents
- Identify categories
- Ordering of text within a unit (i.e. a single
entry in the medical record) - The geography of entries
- What is not written (economy)
17Readings record of medical clinic consultation
- Observing documents in the field
- Document within doctor/patient interaction
- Written for what audience?
18ReadingsOutcome of the Analysis
- Critique of motivation to digitize records
- What are the bad organizational reasons for
good clinical records? - Systematic data entry interferes with expressing
ambivalence, subtlety, with strategic ordering
and omission
19Document analysis Final Thoughts
20Document characteristics
source Bob Glushko
21Interrogating your documents
- Who is the author? Are they identified or not?
- Is it bound with other documents and where is its
placement? - What is the document material?
- Is it written or printed? What can you say about
the fonts, size? - Is a signature on a document required and what
does it mean?
22In Summary
- Limits of content analysis
- Lightweight document analysis where documents
support central research concern - Heavy-duty document analysis where documents are
the central research concern