The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), located in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC mission is to promote health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability. Established in 1946, the CDC have approximately 7,800 employees in 170 occupations at numerous locations throughout the USA.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention run TextAnalyst on Windows NT platform. TextAnalyst was used to assist in analyzing qualitative data collected for Project LinCS. Specifically, it was used to assist with data reduction and identification of emergent themes or patterns in the data. Themes would be used to generate open and axial coding categories that would be incorporated into our existing analysis codebook structure. In-depth analysis would be undertaken using AnSWR (Analysis Software for Word-based Records), a software system designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help researchers manage and analyze text.
Linking Communities and Scientists seeks to develop effective, reliable strategies for enhancing community collaboration in the implementation of HIV-related biomedical intervention trials generally and vaccine efficacy trials specifically. By collaboration, we mean that researchers and community members work together to design research that is sensitive to community concerns, is supportive of existing strengths of the community, and does not diminish but preferably enhances the ability of the community to address future related issues.
The project has collected data on the gay, IDU, and African-American communities in San Francisco, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and Durham NC. In addition, it provides parallel data on the scientific community. The results of the project will help researchers and community advocates identify patterns of communication within communities, potential barriers between researchers and target populations, and research design options that facilitate effective collaboration among researchers and communities.
TextAnalyst automatically analyzes natural language texts from arbitrary application fields. It distills the meaning of a text and helps navigate a textbase, creates summaries of documents, clusters documents, and carries out semantic information retrieval on a collection of texts.
I loved the performance of TextAnalyst! We’ve played with numerous programs, but all required special text formatting or had file size limitations. TextAnalyst was able to efficiently handle numerous and often large (90+ pages apiece) text files without any problem. Furthermore, the program was extremely user-friendly. However, we would like to be able to print and export the semantic analysis structure. If we could somehow import the semantic structure into the AnSWR codebook editor, we’d have a seamless analysis process.
TextAnalyst is much more user-friendly than other programs and does not require special reformatting of data. TextAnalyst generated a new value for the project. Our previous analysis strategy required that we not only generate concordance outputs, but also perform multiple line-by-line reviews of the data just to develop the initial coding categories and guidelines. TextAnalyst effortlessly permits us to undertake preliminary data reduction and analysis simultaneously without missing important information. In addition, it is a valuable tool that we can recommend to our site collaborators less familiar with qualitative data analysis techniques.
Vendor support was timely and enthusiastic.
Reviewer Information
Eleanor McLellan
Data Analyst
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Rd., NE
Atlanta, GA 30333, USA