Advance HE Surveys Conference 2018 - Towards Qualitative Big Data - Steven Wright

Big Data has been dominated by quantitative approaches so what happens to all the rich qualitative comments? This session presents an approach developed at Lancaster University to using content analysis tools to categorise synthesise and interactively explore the comments in the NSS survey. Three packages - Leximancer WordSTAT and NVivo Plus - were compared. Automated topic extraction and sentiment analysis in NVivo Plus was selected to rapidly organise the comment data allowing departmental- faculty- and institutional- level insight into the relationship between aspects of teaching learning and assessment and student evaluations.