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Coding Choices for Thematic Text Analysis: A Comparison of Manual Text Coding and Computer-assisted Coding

By Rim Ktari.

Published by The International Journal of the Humanities

Researchers in the field of social sciences make use of a standard methodology, known as textual analysis, to study the content of communication. This method aims at considering texts under study as to their meaning. It enables researchers to gather large amounts of textual information, which is a necessary step to make it feasible for them to identify its properties. The technique utilized by researchers is called text coding and consists in forming a quantitative analysis of texts. This is done by examining the frequency of most used keywords by the author or creator of the document. “Key Words in Context” (KWIC) is the strategy on which researchers rely so as to detect the most important structures of the communication content. The meaningful reading of the text under scrutiny is guaranteed by a well-constructed categorized analysis of the textual information gathered. Traditionally, text coding was performed manually by researchers who used to read through the text and write down concept occurrences. The technological progress, however, brought about a revolutionary invention, the automation of the coding process. Textual analysis programs can examine huge amounts of data as well as a wider range of texts quickly and efficiently. The automated coding process has, nevertheless, been dependent on the category construction built up by the researcher beforehand. Furthermore, computers can code only based on the information they are given and hence are inefficient in coding for the implicit information.

International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 8, Issue 3, pp.1-12. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 641.721KB).

Rim Ktari

Teaching Assistant, English Department, Higher Institute of Applied Languages and Computer Science-Béja, Tunis, Tunisia