Introduction: Text analysis in the past
The drive for efficiency and automation in market research, coupled with the costly and time-consuming nature of manual coding, makes automated analysis of open-ended text response data an obvious candidate for attention. Indeed, this has long been the case: as Macer and Wilson (2017) and Raud and Fallig (1993) describe, papers on automatic text coding were published as early as the 1990s, and one of the authors recalls unpublished experiments carried out in the early 1980s.
Automated text analysis offers benefits beyond cost savings and reduced lead times. Done successfully, it allows direct and...