A Method to Scale-Up Interpretative Qualitative Analysis, with an Application to Aspirations in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh
The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast potential in economics but has found limited use. This is partly because the interpretative, nuanced human reading of text and coding that it requires is labor intensive and very time consuming. This paper presents a method to simplify and shorten the coding process by extending a small set of interpretative human-codes to a larger, representative, sample using natural language processing and thus analyze qualitative data at scale. It applies it to analyze 2,200 open-ended interviews on parent’s aspirations for children with Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts. It shows that studying aspirations with open-ended interviews extends the economics focus on material goals to ideas from philosophy and anthropology that emphasize aspirations for moral and religious values, and the navigational capacity to achieve these aspirations. The paper shows how to assess the robustness and reliability of this approach and finds that extending the sample of interviews, rather than the human-coded training set, is likely to be optimal.
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022-05
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| Subjects: | ROHINGYA REFUGEE INTERVIEWS, NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, WELL-BEING RESEARCH, NARRATIVE TEXT ANALYSIS, ASPIRATIONS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS, QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS, INEQUALITY, INCLUSION, |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099759305162210822/IDU0a357362e00b6004c580966006b1c2f2e3996 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37453 |
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| Summary: | The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast
potential in economics but has found limited use. This
is partly because the interpretative, nuanced human reading of text and coding that it requires is labor intensive
and very time consuming. This paper presents a method
to simplify and shorten the coding process by extending
a small set of interpretative human-codes to a larger, representative, sample using natural language processing and
thus analyze qualitative data at scale. It applies it to analyze 2,200 open-ended interviews on parent’s aspirations
for children with Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi
hosts. It shows that studying aspirations with open-ended
interviews extends the economics focus on material goals
to ideas from philosophy and anthropology that emphasize
aspirations for moral and religious values, and the navigational capacity to achieve these aspirations. The paper shows
how to assess the robustness and reliability of this approach
and finds that extending the sample of interviews, rather
than the human-coded training set, is likely to be optimal. |
|---|