MAXQDA

Basic Quantitative Corpus Analysis

10.11.2017, 09:08

Hi everyone!

I am doing an analysis of parliamentary speeches and I was wondering whether it is possible to perform some basic quantitative analysis of my documents with MAXQDA Standard.

In particular, I would like to calculate the total number of speeches, the average number of speeches by parliamentary group and the median length - expressed in tokens - of each speech.

Should I get MAXDictio for this? it seems to me that MAXDictio is about word frequencies analysis, but I am not sure it actually allows corpus analysis.

I would be glad for any help on this matter.

Thank you in advance!

All the best,

Stella

Version: MAXQDA 12
System: Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)
s.gianfreda
 
Posts: 1
Joined: 10.11.2017, 09:03

Re: Basic Quantitative Corpus Analysis

13.11.2017, 11:54

Hi Stella!

Thanks for asking! Well, you can use the (extended) lexical search to autocode certain words or phrases, and then you can use those codes (also in combination with your own analytical codes) in (complex) retrieval queries to analyse your material. MAXDictio can show you the frequencies of words in general, of word combinations, or you can define your own dictionaries and count only words or categories of words that hold a certain meaning. Besides that you can use features like "Keyword-in-Context" to look at certain terms in their context, or use the "Interactive Wordtree" to explore your text. To get a comprehensive overview of alle the MAXDictio features, I recommend watching our two video tutorials about MAXDictio (the second one shows the most features):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENuxRzU8bI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euNiS-7_ge0

[quote:1wp6cyp6]In particular, I would like to calculate the total number of speeches, the average number of speeches by parliamentary group and the median length - expressed in tokens - of each speech.[/quote:1wp6cyp6]

Well, if you simply have all of your speeches in one folder (1 speech = 1 document), you could simply activate the folder and see at the very bottom (far to the left) how many documents are then activated. If your speeches are distributed across many different folders, then you will have to tell MAXQDA which ones of yor documents are speeches. You could use document variables for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSpdv1VJEMQ

Also the different factions/parliamentary groups are best operationalized as document variables. Using MAXDictio, you can also transform the number of words for each document into a document variable (using the feature "Frequencies for Dictionary Categories"). All of the different frequency features offer to calculate the TTR (type-token-ratio) for individual or multiple documents:

https://www.maxqda.com/en/support/help/m ... esults.htm

I hope this helps! In case of any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Kind regards,

Andreas
Andreas V.
 

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