Dr. Ralph Bishop

Presenters include: Patrick Kulesa and Ralph Bishop, ISR

Ralph Bishop is manager for qualitative research at International Survey Research.He uses WordStat to analyse verbatim answers in employee surveys in up to six different language, for which he has developed subject-specific dictionaries.He comments: "The most appealing thing about WordStat is its own open-endedness.You really don't need to code your text, though you can if you want.But so far I have found that using text analysis and properly choosing the context works just fine for me.It is good for any kind of research where there is open-ended material of any kind."Dr Bishop advises that to get the best out of it, some hard graft is needed first, to build a good domain-specific dictionary or lexicon.Once this has been done, it can be re-used on any other project sharing the same subject domain - though it benefits from a periodic refresh to keep it relevant."The trick is to understand how to manipulate the dictionaries" he confides. Once that is out of the way, he reports it means you deal with large volumes of verbatims very quickly."This is most helpful because everything we do is done under very tight deadlines."He cautions: "You still have to be very careful about noise, typically words that are used in different context.Words like competitive - 'competitive environment', 'competitive salary' and so on.Natural language is full of these kinds of ambiguities so you cannot expect always to get absolute clear-cut distinctions."But Dr Bishop also sees potential for the tool to make researchers more adventurous in their use of verbatim questions.

The user view: Ralph Bishop at International Survey Research

Ralph Bishop is manager for qualitative research at International Survey Research. He uses WordStat to analyse verbatim answers in employee surveys in up to six different language, for which he has developed subject-specific dictionaries.

He comments: "The most appealing thing about WordStat is its own open-endedness. You really don't need to code your text, though you can if you want. But so far I have found that using text analysis and properly choosing the context works just fine for me. It is good for any kind of research where there is open-ended material of any kind."

Dr Bishop advises that to get the best out of it, some hard graft is needed first, to build a good domain-specific dictionary or lexicon. Once this has been done, it can be re-used on any other project sharing the same subject domain - though it benefits from a periodic refresh to keep it relevant. "The trick is to understand how to manipulate the dictionaries" he confides.

Once that is out of the way, he reports it means you deal with large volumes of verbatims very quickly. "This is most helpful because everything we do is done under very tight deadlines."

He cautions: "You still have to be very careful about noise, typically words that are used in different context. Words like competitive - 'competitive environment', 'competitive salary' and so on. Natural language is full of these kinds of ambiguities so you cannot expect always to get absolute clear-cut distinctions."

But Dr Bishop also sees potential for the tool to make researchers more adventurous in their use of verbatim questions.