Conferences

Assume one has open-ended questions in a survey and seriously wants to analyse the answers to these questions. Now text analysis might be
applied. This talk discusses a number of choices to be made when a thematic text analysis is to be applied. It starts with requirements to
be posed to the open-ended questions themselves and sketches choices in the development of a category system. Here the coding comes immediately
into view. Coding can be performed from an instrumental or a representational perspective. In the first the coding is performed from
the point of view of the investigator, it can be performed in a run of a computer program. In the second the point of view of the respondent is
acknowledged. Now the computer can be used as a management tool, but the coding itself must be performed by a human coder. The choice for one of
these methods depends on what the investigator is looking for and has consequences for the way how to proceed. When the representational way
of coding is applied also questions about intercoder reliability must be posed. The talk is illustrated by examples mainly based on data from
Dutch election studies.