Try Leximancer

Hi Irfan, here are a couple to start with: Wordstat (out of Montreal, reasonably priced) and Leximancer (Australia - very pricey). Stata and R also does a bit of text mining. You can look up others using "text mining software"

Thank you for sharing.

I took a look at the software but I find that its purpose is not conducive for analyzing information and creating themes. I'm wondering if the software itself scans the text and suggests themes. In other words, does the software take in raw text and returns suggested themes from the text? that is the question I'm looking for an anwer to.

Yes. Take a look at my big data paper. I did exactly that with Leximancer.

Ajax Persaud thank you for sharing this information. However, your paper does not indicate exactly what I'm looking for a software to do. In other words, the software must be A.I. driven. I must be able to feed it text without me having to manually identify the themes. The software must be able to output a suggested list of themes without me having to identify keywords. I do not believe that currently such software exists. If it did then we, as analysts, become irrelevant to the analysis process because the software then becomes the conduit for producing themes. One way, we identify themes is by looking at the context in which participants provide their answers. For example, If I want to know where college students get their personal values from, the keywords, family, culture, and or social influences are potential themes. I haven't found the software that can output these themes without me having to manually identify these words.

Neither quantitative nor qualitative software "does the analysis". You do the analysis. What would a piece of software know about your research question?

If software did the analysis for you, we would give it the PhD. Come on – you're supposed to be the one doing the research!

Ronán Michael Conroy Thank you for confirmation. I already knew this answer. I wanted confirmation that I was correct. Someone was telling me otherwise but my research into the various software programs showed me that the researcher is the analyst and not the software. The software is more for data organization and reporting and never for analysis.

Delia De Jesus having said that, there is a great reluctance among qualitative researchers to engage with software like Orange that will process huge volumes of text looking for patterns. Such an analysis can be very useful in developing and refining ideas.

Ronán Michael Conroy when we get there .... there will be NO need for us as analysts because the software can easily scan volumes of data to suggest themes. That's what we do as analyst. Our themes are mere suggestions and nothing else.

Hi ,

There is nothing more interesting than analyzing qualitative data.

A good researcher should never rely on these software programs because they never read between the lines. I read every transcript, once, twice and three times. I do the coding manually. Then give two other people to do the same. Then we meet and discuss. Sometimes we underestimate sentences said by our interviewees, which the software never captures. The more I do the analysis myself the more I learn from the research, the better researcher I become.

Don't look for short cuts in writing your analysis. Do it and enjoy it. it takes a long time but is worth the learning experience.

Wahiba Abu-Ras Much gratitude and appreciation for your response is noted here. I agree with you that "WE" the researchers are the most valuable instrument to the coding process. If software did our jobs then what have we to look forward to? I enjoy reading the particpant responses line for line and looking for emergent themes. Although, I do recognize that in volumes in data this approach might not be feasible, there are instances in which the human analysis is truly the best analysis. Artificial intelligence has its place in the world. I do not believe that our time to remove human interaction in the manual process has come to an end. Thank you.