Thematic Text Analysis: New Agendas for Analyzing Text Content
Philip J. Stone
Abstract
This chapter discusses how the business text-analysis applications have expanded, especially for analyzing open-ended interviews, making it perhaps one of the most extensively employed social science tools today. Clinicians, anthropologists, journalists, market researchers, and humanists are among the varied folk who have looked for themes in text. Any systematic thematic text analysis risks alarming those who worry whether it can do justice to a text’s meaning. Thematic text analysis becomes especially worthwhile when used to predict outcomes and make nonobvious but valid inferences. The Gallup Organization, for example, has a proven ability, based on over a half-million job interviews, to use thematic indexes to identify those who will be outstanding performers in a particular job. The text analysis approach that has evolved at Communication Development Company is particularly interesting because it combines a priori categorization using text analysis dictionaries implemented in several languages with analyses targeted to a client’s situation.