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Fields in the social sciences, such as education research, have started to expand the use of computer-based research methods to supplement traditional research approaches. Natural language processing techniques, such as topic modeling, may support qualitative data analysis by providing early categories that researchers may interpret and refine. This study contributes to this body of research and answers the following research questions: (RQ1) What is the relative coverage of the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model and human coding in terms of the breadth of the topics/themes extracted from the text collection? (RQ2) What is the relative depth or level of detail among identified topics using LDA topic models and human coding approaches? A dataset of student reflections was qualitatively analyzed using LDA topic modeling and human coding approaches, and the results were compared. The findings suggest that topic models can provide reliable coverage and depth of themes present in a textual collection comparable to human coding but require manual interpretation of topics. The breadth and depth of human coding output is heavily dependent on the expertise of coders and the size of the collection; these factors are better handled in the topic modeling approach.
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Using Topic Modeling for Code Discovery in Large Scale Text Data
When text datasets are very large, manually coding line by line becomes impractical. As a result, researchers sometimes try to use machine learning algorithms to automatically code text data. One of the most popular algorithms is topic modeling. For a given text dataset, a topic model provides probability distributions of words for a set of “topics” in the data, which researchers then use to interpret meaning of the topics. A topic model also gives each document in the dataset a score for each topic, which can be used as a non-binary coding for what proportion of a topic is in the document. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to interpret what the topics mean in a defensible way, or to validate document topic proportion scores as meaningful codes. In this study, we examine how keywords from codes developed by human experts were distributed in topics generated from topic modeling. The results show that (1) top keywords of a single topic often contain words from multiple human-generated codes; and conversely, (2) words from human-generated codes appear as high-probability keywords in multiple topic. These results explain why directly using topics from topic models as codes is problematic. However, they also imply that topic modeling makes it possible for researchers to discover codes from short word lists.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1661036
- PAR ID:
- 10248616
- Editor(s):
- Ruis, Andrew; Lee, Seung B.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advances in Quantitative Ethnography: Second International Conference, ICQE 2020, Malibu, CA, USA, February 1-3, 2021, Proceedings
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 18 - 31
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67788-6_2
