Agency and Amplification: A Comparison of Manual and Computational Thematic Analyses by Public Health Researchers
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Date
2023-01
Authors
Gauthier, Robert
Pelletier, Catherine
Carrier, Laurie-Ann
dionne, Maude
Dubé, Ève
Meyer, Samantha B.
Wallace, James
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ACM
Abstract
Computational techniques offer a means to overcome the amplified complexity and resource-intensity of qualitative research on online communities. However, we lack an understanding of how these techniques are integrated by researchers in practice, and how to address concerns about researcher agency in the qualitative research process. To explore this gap, we deployed the Computational Thematic Analysis Toolkit to a team of public health researchers, and compared their analysis to a team working with traditional tools and methods. Each team independently conducted a thematic analysis of a corpus of comments from Canadian news sites to understand discourses around vaccine hesitancy. We then compared the analyses to investigate how computational techniques may have influenced their research process and outcomes. We found that the toolkit provided access to advanced computational techniques for researchers without programming expertise, facilitated their interaction and interpretation of the data, but also found that it influenced how they approached their thematic analysis.
Description
© Gauthier, Pelletier, Carrier, Dionne, Dube, Meyer, Wallace | ACM, 2023. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, https://doi.org/10.1145/3567552.
Keywords
case study, field deployment, comparison, thematic analysis, computational methods