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Basic Terms
In the following section, some important and in this manual frequently used terms will be explained, including:
q text
q text section or unit
q word
q word stem
q stop list
q go-list
q search item
q dictionary
q coding
Text
A text is a DOC-file in Word or a single document in the “Document System” in MAXQDA. The format of the text is Rich Text Format.
Note: MAXDictio only analyzes the mere text, which means, for the word frequencies, it is irrelevant which font is being used or if words are written in bold or italic.
Text Section/Text Unit
Similar to a book, texts can be subdivided into chapters and subchapters. Chapters may not overlap, just as in a book Chapter 3 and 4 may not overlap. During import, a text can already be subdivided into sections (text units) with the text pre-processor. But it is also possible to make the text units in MAXQDA simply by coding text passages. The “MAXDictio Coder” can analyze text passages separately. Each text unit will appear individually in a line of the table of results.
Word
For MAXDictio, a word is any string of characters which are situated between two blanks or cut-off punctuation characters (such as , ; . :).
Word Stem
With a modification of the general terminology, in MAXDictio a word stem is to be understood as any part of a word. This means it is not only the left part or the stem form of the word; the “word stem” can also be situated in the middle of the word (so “go” would be a word stem of “going,” “bingo,” and “undergoes”).
Stop list
Stop lists contain collections of words that are supposed to be ignored in the word frequency analysis. Generally, these are indefinite and definite articles, numerals, and so on.
Go-List
A go-list functions pretty much conversely to a stop list. It contains words to which the frequency analysis should be confined, i.e. only words that are on the list will be considered in the analysis.
Index
An index is a list of words that includes their references, i.e. the passages where they can be found in the text(s).
Dictionary
A dictionary is composed of categories and words or character strings which are assigned to the categories. For instance, the words “Italy,” “Great Britain,” “Germany,” “Belgium,” “Netherlands,” and “Spain” could be assigned to the category “Europe.”
In principle, dictionaries are not project-dependent. They can be used again for other projects. The dictionary represents a classification scheme for the coder.
Search Item
A search item is a string of characters, one or more words, which are attached to a category in a dictionary.
Coding
The word ‘coding’ in MAXDictio carries the same meaning as in quantitative content analysis. Based on the words in the dictionary, MAXDictio counts how frequently the categories appear in the texts or text passages. The table of results shows the number of times a category appeared within each text unit. With the aid of this information, it is then possible to carry out statistical calculations.
Schematic Course© VERBI Software. Consult. Sozialforschung. GmbH, Berlin 2014, v11.1.0 |