Approaches to Text Analysis for Finding Cultural Groups: LGBTQ Campus Climate

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Sexuality, Intersectionality, and Identities

Abstract

Automated text analysis and network methods are becoming more common and prominent in the study of culture. In this paper, I compare several automated approaches with one another and with a human-labor-intensive structured coding approach using the same data. I also briefly describe some findings from qualitative open coding. Rather than argue which method is “best,” I demonstrate that they each reveal different things about the data and that diverse approaches can yield additional insights when evaluated in concert. I further extend the literature by using the text to generate networks of people instead of words or ideas. While networks of words and ideas give us insight into the symbolic landscape of culture, networks of people offer insight into the social landscape: how people are grouped and divided according to the words and ideas they express. Throughout, I use a large corpus of open ended text responses from a college LGBTQ campus climate survey to demonstrate how these methods can be used to generate both expected and unexpected insights.

Author

• Jeffrey W. Lockhart, University of Michigan