From:    Brigitte Beauvais 
Subject: TextSmart or WordStat?

TextSmart or WordStat?

I am looking for a program to analyse responses to open-ended
questions.  So far, I have been able to locate two programs for this.

 1) TextSmart distribute by SPSS

    http://www.spss.com/software/textsmart/aspany/proc/any/hagl04249803.htm

 2) WordStat from Provalis Research

    http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/simstat/wordstat.htm249803.htm

Does anyboday have any experience with these two programs or with
another package?  Any recommendation?

Both programs seems to offer about the same capabilities but TextSmart
is a lot more expensive than WordStat ($2000 vs $100-200).

Brigitte

------------------------------


Brigitte,

The two programs you mention seem to be the primary high-
end contenders.  There is a good web page summarizing a
number of content analysis programs at:

  http://gwdu19.gwdg.de/~mromppe/contsoft.htmmstat/wordstat.htm249803.htm

I have just acquired TextSmart and will be using it to
look for patterns in open-ended training evaluation
questions.  I am just getting started with this, so I
do not yet have any insights to share.

I just picked up the following book on content analysis
that may be of interest to you:

Text Analysis for the Social Sciences : Methods for Drawing
  Statistical Inferences from Texts and Transcripts (Lea's
  Communication Series) Carl W. Roberts (Editor)
  Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.  1997

I would like to move on to a more technical source that
talks specifically about cluster analysis and content
analysis.  The documentation with TextSmart is minimal
and focuses on software features rather than analysis
strategies.

I'd love to compare notes with you and others as I learn
the TextSmart package.  Please let me know what else you
learn in response to your post.  I'm also interested in
knowing what kind of content analysis task you are
involved in.

Good luck,
John Ford