In today’s digital age, businesses are generating vast amounts of text-based data every hour. This includes customer feedback, social media comments, employee comments, product reviews, internal emails, operation reports, incident reports, etc. Organizations have text data that can provide valuable insights but are they taking full advantage of this resource? Probably not. If not, they […]

  Covid 19 has presented extraordinary challenges to almost everyone around the world and to almost all facets of life including: health care, the economy, personal interactions, education, transportation, supply-chain, mental health, law enforcement to name just a few. One of the crucial elements in dealing with a pandemic that affects all aspects of daily […]

  Microsoft is currently rolling out its latest version of Windows, Windows 11. This is the successor to Windows 10. As with any new software rollout there will be some bumps along the way. Windows 10, while not bug free, has been with us for 5 years. If you are using a PC and updating […]

Analyzing Arabic with WordStat WordStat text mining software can help you analyze more than 60 languages including; Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russia, Turkish and Arabic. Even though the information is available on our website, we are often asked by prospective customers about WordStat’s languages capabilities beyond the obvious ones like English and the main European languages. […]

What is Narrative Analysis? Narratives can come from almost anything; interviews, books, blogs, journals, diaries, autobiographies, podcasts, videos, audio recordings, anywhere someone is telling a story. Narrative analysis is the technique of using those narratives to address a research question, to examine business issues, to understand or develop public policy, etc.[1] It is a form […]

An analysis of Twitter Data Using WordStat More and more researchers are using social media as a means to try to understand or explain the impact of events and social policy on society at large or on different targeted groups. We know anecdotally, personally and from media reports the Covid-19 pandemic has had different effects […]

Intel-based Macs (2006-2020) Up until the end of last year, several options were available to run QDA Miner, WordStat or SimStat on Mac computers.  Since 2006, Apple computers came equipped with Intel chips, the same chips used in PCs.  One could even remove the MacOS and transform an Apple computer into a pure Windows machine […]

A text analytics study of Twitter data using Wordstat 8 We have all heard the stories about people around the world stocking up on utilitarian goods such as toilet paper, soap, disinfectant, and other products at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. News reports showing barren store shelves brought the situation home and created the […]

  Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has been with us now for more than a year and it is likely to remain in some form for many months to come. Researchers haven’t wasted anytime in looking into the impacts of the pandemic on many, many fields including health care, mental health, the news media, social media, […]

  In the 2020 presidential election, most exit polls showed Donald Trump largely holding on to his support among white evangelicals with approximately 81% support essentially the same as in 2016 (AP VoteCast). Trump saw a drop in the white Catholic vote to Biden, who is Catholic, but gained among Catholic Hispanics. Trump held this […]

Text analytics and text mining have many uses in human resources. There is one main reason, there is a lot of text-based communication in almost every organization; employee surveys, performance reviews general employee feedback, resumes, “town hall” meetings, social media, and so on. HR departments realize that regularly analyzing and tracking this communication can improve […]

Build or buy? This is a question we run into often. Why should I buy your text mining product or something similar from one of your competitors when I can build it myself? Is there an easy answer to this question? Maybe not easy, but we think once you look at the different factors in […]

We all know that Covid-19 has decimated the travel industry. Most experts believe it will take years before travel returns to 2019 levels. What will it take to get there? In their paper Ugur & Akbiyik (2020) use text mining to look for some of the potential answers. The paper uses data from early in […]

Content marketing is a strategic marketing method to develop valuable and relevant brand content to a target audience. It is not about pushing products but about relating and sharing stories to build relationships and connect with specific consumers. Content marketing has been used for years. There are many examples of specially targeted publications that were […]

The Covid 19 virus has been with us since late 2019 but only spread into a pandemic in early 2020. That is just seven months ago. Since then there have been thousands of journal articles, news reports, editorials, reports, commentaries, blogs and all other matter of text documents dealing with the virus, its spread and […]

Bibliometrics and scientometrics often involve the monitoring of research, the assessment of the scientific contribution of authors, journals, specific works, or citations as well as the analysis of the dissemination process of scientific knowledge. The discipline has grown rapidly over the last 10-20 years. One of the reasons is the advent of readily available computer […]

John Ford Public Sector Research Psychologist The author can be reached at This is the second of two Blogs on the Hiller Dictionary. The first one is titled Hiller Vagueness Dictionary: A Content Analysis Dictionary that Keeps on Giving The Hiller Communication Vagueness scales are useful measures of document clarity because they use vocabulary […]

This is the first of two Blogs on the Hiller Vagueness Dictionary It all started back in the late sixties and early seventies when J.H. Hiller and his collaborators wrote a series of papers exploring communication vagueness. Back in those early days they used computer-assisted content analysis to analyze lectures, students papers and presentations to […]

How is the media covering the death of George Floyd and the resulting protests? While we are still in the midst of the protests which are continuing across the U.S. and around the world we thought it would be of interest to examine how several media organizations are covering the event and how they compare […]

In this Blog we are highlighting papers authored with the use of our qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and our content analysis and text mining software WordStat. This post features a paper where the authors use visual content analysis by employing QDA Miner to code images of sculpture taken by tourists and posted on […]

Dr Uwe Ewald Director of the International Justice Analysis Forum Uwe Ewald is the director of the International Justice Analysis Forum. IJA-Forum offers support in evidentiary analysis required for complex (international) crime cases, based on its expert network and roster of analysts and researchers. He started using qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and the […]

  To paraphrase the theme song of a 1960s U.S. TV show Mr. Ed, A horse is a horse of course, of course, and no one can find so many horses unless, of course, you are using WordStat! (inspired by original lyrics by Jay Livingston). See Video on YouTube. WordStat and QDA Miner software have […]

In this Blog we will be introducing you to different people who use Provalis Research software in their work. We hope this will give users and potential users of the software an idea of the type of work people are doing and the capabilities of the software. Our first profile is of Lara Gautier who […]

  Framing is an active, evolving process to construct meaning and the evolution of frames reflects change in social movement or among activists. (Benford and Snow (2000)). Framing allows people to make sense of their world or events by putting it into context. In their paper Opposition to Abortion Then and Now: How Amicus Briefs […]

The media and the Democrats have never been popular with Fox News which many would argue is a large part of its appeal. Even with a global pandemic threatening the country not much has changed. Of course, this is something the mainstream media writes about and comments on with regularity. Lee Moran from Huffington Post […]

The 2020 Democratic primary elections are underway, and ‘Super Tuesday’ has put Biden in the lead following endorsements by withdrawn candidates Buttigieg and Klobuchar. You may have seen our tweet, showcasing the potential of text analytics to describe the debates and the candidates, in this case via a deviation table and correspondence analysis plot. We […]

Blackcurrent, blueberry, pancetta, chestnut, spicey, crisp, complex, oxidized. What do all these words have in common? They were used by “civilians” and experts to describe wines in three regions of Australia and Bordeau, France. In their paper Using Content Analysis to Characterise the Sensory Typicity and Quality Judgements of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon Wines, Lira Souza […]

  I have been using the qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner since 2015. I used it multiple times for my doctoral research in global public health. It was very useful for coding my interview transcriptions and a variety of policy documents related to my PhD research topic. In addition, thanks to the handy “Code […]

  North Korea, often called the hermit kingdom, is a land we know little about but one we are hearing about more and more because of its nuclear program and because of the unique relationship between its leader Kim Jung-on and U.S. President Donald Trump. While still very secretive and closed to the outside world, […]

    Monitoring Implementation of CRPD and SDG Through Big Data Analytics and Text Mining Derrick L. Cogburn American University Introduction As we look at the major global frameworks to support disability-inclusive international development, especially the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Habitat III […]

What is Observational Research? Watch what I do, not what I say, could be a good lead-in for Observational Research. People in focus groups or in surveys may say one thing such as, “I always buy green apples” but perhaps when observed they buy the less costly apples, or the freshest looking apples. Observational research […]

  Our distributor in Australia, SurveyDesign.com has written this quick Blog that we thought you might find instructive: How to Import PDF’s into WordStat for Stata. You can also see a video tutorial on our website on how to import PDF and other documents such as ASCII, Rich Text Format, MS Word, HTML and WordPerfect documents […]

    Social media platforms are becoming ubiquitous in the tourism industry around the world. Travelers are using social media to write reviews, plan travel, connect with others and communicate with providers. Likewise, airlines, hotels, restaurants and tour companies, are using social media to market and promote their products, communicate with their clients and as […]

INTRODUCTION Part I of our blog series introduced Automatic Machine Learning Document Classification (AML-DC). Part II of our blog series on Automatic Machine Learning Document Classification (AML-DC) provides a practical and detailed walkthrough on the development and implementation of a supervised AML-DC model in fast, reproducible, reliable and auditable way. RESEARCH PROBLEM How does one […]

    Companies are always trying to find easy and accurate ways to measure customer satisfaction or customer sentiment.  In the last decade Net Promoter Score (NPS) has emerged as a favorite.  Many companies have adopted it as a standard. The one-question survey developed by Fred Reicheld, Bain and Company, “How likely are you to […]

From time-to-time in this Blog we draw your attention to some of the applications of text analytics. In the last few years one of those areas has been predictive analysis, using text mining to explore large databases. Using text mining to learn from past behavior, discover patterns and identify trends, allows researchers are able to […]

This blog focuses on Automatic Machine Learning Document Classification (AML-DC), which is part of the broader topic of Natural Language Processing (NLP)

As we have learned, during the 2016 US Presidential Election there were significant efforts by outside actors to influence the vote. There have been several investigations and reports written into those efforts. The following is a Blog by Ryan Atkinson explaining how he took a content analysis approach to examining more than a large volume […]

We have introduced a special new feature to WordStat 8. This is a brand new feature that we believe you will find quite useful. We are calling it the Deviation Table. It allows you to see which words, phrases or topics are used more or less by different values of a categorical variable. You can […]

    Stata users can now directly import text data from many different platforms using WordStat for Stata. The latest version of WordStat for Stata (8) can be run as a stand-alone software or integrated with STATA. This means Stata users can use WordStat to directly import text data related to their quantitative data and […]

    We are always looking for ways to make your text mining experience easier, better, more precise and ….more fun. It is what drives us. We think you will find the recently released WordStat 8 checks all these boxes. Easier.  Import documents and create projects directly in WordStat. Use our new Explorer mode for […]

    WordStat for Stata gives you the capability to analyze any string variables/text data contained in numerical and categorical files that you are analyzing in Stata. WordStat combines natural language processing, content analysis, and statistical techniques to quickly extract topics, patterns, and relationships in large amounts of text. It can process millions of words in seconds […]

Content Analysis and Topic Modeling of Trump/Clinton Tweets These days the world, or at least the media, is all a twitter over the tweets emanating from the President of the United States. It seems as if every morning we wake up to some new missive, observation or attack the President has unleashed against real or […]

  Engaged employees are better employees. Studies have shown they are more productive, take fewer sick days and have fewer work-related injury or illness.  The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MPSB) has found that departments and programs with more engaged employees perform better. Measuring employee engagement is important so that management can take steps to […]

  Ok, we acknowledge from the get-go that government regulation isn’t the sexiest topic on the planet. But what if we told you there is a tool/technique that can help us reduce or at least streamline the amount of government regulations we have on the books? Good idea? We think so.  The technique is text […]

Immigration, immigrants, and refugees are a popular topic around the world these days. It is a topic with wide-ranging points of view and comments are often loaded with emotion. In the book, Representing the Other in European Media Discourse,  Dr. Liisi Laineste, Senior Researcher, Estonian Library Museum, Tartu University contributes Chapter 12, “Othering in Estonian […]

Insurance fraud is a worldwide problem. The numbers are staggering. According to the FBI, in the U.S. alone, insurance fraud (ex healthcare) costs Americans $40 billion a year. That works out to $400-to-$700 per family. That means higher premiums. So how do companies crack down on fraud? How can they ferret it out? One of […]

Mission statements are an important strategic management tool for many companies, large and small. Well crafted, they serve as a quick reference to internal and external stakeholders as to what a company is and what it does.  They can help leadership and employees formulate a strategic direction around common goals and values. Mission statements, their […]

Today “texting” is one of the principal means of communication for many people the world over, especially in the United States. It is also a form of communication that you can engage in relatively anonymously. These were a couple of the reasons why the non-profit, Crisis Text Line was started in 2013. One of the […]

Today’s headlines are filled with international stories about nuclear proliferation, climate change accords, free-trade agreements and other global issues. Embedded in these reports are frequent references to, the international community. For example, a recent headline claimed that in his speech to the UN General Assembly, U.S. President Donald Trump praised the international community for voting […]

Montreal, Canada’s second largest city, known for its European flair, its culinary prowess, and its many festivals, is also home to Provalis Research.  We are very proud of our city, and one of the things that makes us proudest is the tech scene. Major players are converging on Montreal because of its burgeoning AI scene. […]

What would Snoo do? That could be an Ask Me Anything question on Reddit. Snoo is the Reddit mascot and Ask Me Anything is one of the site’s features where Redditors ask celebrities and others….well anything! Reddit is a social media site with more than 200 million users a month. It bills itself as, The […]

I can’t take any more photos, there is no space left on my smart phone! My Windows is running so slow, I must free up some space! I’m quite sure you have experienced these desperate situations. From the first days of the computer, infinite storage capacity was one of the goals. Needproof, Okay! ENIACwas the […]

Although relatively simple, Naïve Bayes (NB) is one of the powerful machine learning techniques. It’s not only simple but fast and accurate and has been used in various applications and domains. So, it’s a reliable friend that you can trust on rainy days! In this post, we will see how it works. Who is NB’s […]

In our previous post on machine learning, we explained that there are supervised and unsupervised beasts lurking in machine learning land! One of the simplest machine learning techniques is the K-nearest neighbors (KNN). In this post, we will briefly review the way KNN works. We’ve all heard of lazy guys! With technology being more accessible […]

  As more data becomes available, it gets harder to find and discover what to look for! As we discussed in our previous post topic modeling is a powerful unsupervised machine learning technique to discover hidden themes in a collection of documents. Topic modeling has achieved popularity in different disciplines because it offers several meaningful […]

John Ford is a public sector Research Psychologist who has authored numerous reports and articles about assessment, training, and other personnel management issues. He wrote this guest blog about a recent challenge of how to deal more efficiently with out of office messages with respect to tabulating the survey response rate. In this blog he […]

Throughout history, we have been interested in seeing the future, either in the form of checking the arrival time of the prince on a white horse or predicting stock prices to get rich! What caused this curse?! It’s probably part of human nature but we can also trace fortune-telling back to the advent of astrology, […]

Using quantitative content analysis to see beyond the veil by Peter Jacques, Professor in Global Environmental Politics, Sustainability at University of Central Florida.

Qualitative data analysis,  text mining tools, and techniques are used by people in many disciplines around the world (market research, human resources, political science, sociology, communications, risk assessment, supply chain management  etc) To give you an insight into some of the processes and techniques we are asking different experts, who use our software and other […]

Many believe robotics is on the cusp of becoming the next technological revolution and that we should expect a significant impact from “intelligent” robots in the near future. Even today, we can see robots and intelligent systems working here and there in different domains. But, robotics is only one application of machine learning and artificial […]

We saw earlier that although machines are stone-hearted, they can learn! As a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning algorithms enable computers to learn from data, and even improve themselves, without being explicitly programmed. That’s how your Siri communicates with you, or how your super car parks itself, or, partially, how your bank approves […]

Alright, so you have a huge pile of documents and you want to find mysterious patterns you believe are hidden within! A challenging task, but you are lucky because you have WordStat in your arsenal. That means, you have at least two options: 1) topic modeling, or 2) cluster analysis to find patterns and groupings […]

One of our colleagues, David White, used WordStat to see how Donald Trump’s tweeting has changed from his time as a business man and TV host to candidate, President-elect and President. David is a Director at Survey Design and Analysis Services PTY LTD and a distributor of Provalis Research software in Australia. Click on the […]

  Just a hint of wild current with a smooth, buttery finish.  Whiffs of vanilla gently melded with soft, chewy tannins. Tastes good and it has a nice dark color. It goes well with fish… There are many, many ways to describe wine. The words change depending on your knowledge, expertise and where you come […]

Nostalgia, some people see it as a warm fuzzy feeling or a state of mind but it is a complex psychological construct that can be triggered in various ways such as revisiting your childhood neighborhood or looking at gifts reminding you of loved ones. Like many feelings, it’s double-sided! If you become too drawn to […]

  Text analytics and QDA Miner and WordStat software have many uses in many, many fields. In this blog we are posting a paper that combines the text analysis of scouting reports on potential National Hockey League players and performance metrics. This is used to create to a methodology to find the best players available […]

  A very basic introduction to Topic Modelling   In this post, we will walk you through the concept of topic modelling. Let’s say I have found your diary (yeah, I know all the great hiding spots!) and I have only two minutes to understand your innermost secrets! How about reading it from the scratch? […]

  This report is a summary of an analysis of the speeches of the five principal candidates in the French Presidential election campaign and it has a particular focus on the speeches of Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron.   Methodology We analyzed a total of 154 speeches given by five principal candidates in the […]

Ce texte présente les résultats sommaires d’une analyse de discours des cinq plus importants candidats à la présidentielle française, en se centrant sur les particularités des discours de Marine Le Pen et Emmanuel Macron.   MÉTHODOLOGIE Nous avons analysé à l’aide du logiciel d’analyse sémantique WordStat 154 discours prononcés entre le 20 janvier 2016 et […]

Machine learning is a very hot buzzword these days that mostly crops up when you read about Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining. At the first glance it may sound complicated and scary! You don’t have to look farther than the top Internet search hits you receive which will most likely direct you to bunch of […]

WordStat for Stata content analysis and text mining software now supports two solutions for use on Mac computers. One of the requests we received when we released WordStat for Stata in 2015 was to develop the ability for people to be able to use WordStat for Stata on the Mac computer platform. We listened and […]

WordStat for Stata for Mac with CrossOver WordStat for Stata (v7.1.13) content analysis and text mining software now supports not one but two solutions for use on Mac computers. One of the requests we received when we released WordStat for Stata in 2015 was to develop the ability for people to be able to use […]

Text Analytics is the process of discovering information from unstructured text (written and verbal) through the identification of trends, topics, and patterns in text documents.  Text analytics software provides you with tools to perform these tasks with the speed and power of modern computing. Why should you use it? The short answer is because it can […]

The advent of social media, online surveys, feedback forms and other electronic records means that we can now quickly collect massive amounts of customer experience data. The challenge for businesses is that the responses, comments and other feedback are usually in the form of unstructured text (emails, texts, tweets, Facebook comments, reviews and so on). […]

  One of the things users of QDA Miner, WordStat, and Simstat have been asking for is more access to training. In response to these requests, we have just launched a Trainer page on our website. The trainer page is the beginning of what we expect will be an extensive group of trainers across the […]

Your employees are your greatest resource, use them I always found it odd that, in my experience, one of the most conservative departments in most companies is the human resources department.  I found it odd because this should be the department with its finger on the pulse of the company and its employees. And especially […]

What’s new in QDA Miner Lite 2.0 ? QDA Miner Lite 2.0 is full of exciting new features and improvements. This free and easy to use qualitative analysis software includes several of the new features that were added to the recently released QDA Miner 5. QDA Miner Lite 2.0 is faster and includes new functions […]

Words matter in political science. Politics, political theory and political change are often expressed through the spoken and written word and political science is influenced by many other disciplines including: economics, history, law, sociology, philosophy and psychology. Political analysis involves researching news articles, magazines, advertisements, speeches, press releases, social media and much more. The volume […]

QDA Miner 5 is now available. The latest version offers a variety of new features that allows you to directly import data from more sources, better analyze your data and gives you more options to display your results. In this Blog, we have highlighted some of the new features and provided a quick review as […]

One of the goals of this Blog is to provide you with news about developments in text analysis and the different ways it is being used around the world. We thought this article “Text Mining Analysis: A New Tool for a New Type of Research” about text mining literature related to violent extremism was a […]

  When managing international qualitative research projects, one of the major challenges is getting answers to our key research questions, and the relevant quotations to support them, in a standardized format, from all our field researchers across target cities and countries. My first international qualitative project, nearly twenty years ago, covered four Caribbean countries; four […]

  QDA Miner offers computer assisted coding allowing you to code documents quickly and reliably. QDA Miner offers not just one but seven text search and retrieval tools, allowing you to achieve more reliable coding in less time. Let’s look at some of these tools:   The Keyword Retrieval tool can search for hundreds of […]

Charting your codes case by case and comparing them to other cases in your project is only a couple of clicks away in QDA Miner 5. It really is quick and easy! This blog is a follow-up to the one where we outlined the new Document Overview feature. To begin charting the codes in each […]

Being able to “see” what you’ve coded in a document can give you a better understanding of the coding and sometimes spark an idea of where else you want to go in your research. QDA Miner 5 has a new Document Overview feature that provides you with a quick look at the spatial distribution of […]

Just to name a few:  Email, company internet and intranet, Facebook, twitter, customer feedback, online reviews, employee chat groups, employee surveys, performance reviews, exit interviews, analyst reports, supplier feedback, safety reports, quality control, sustainability and environmental reports…the list goes on and on. One thing all these and many other channels have in common is unstructured […]

  Do you know Pecha Kucha? It’s a presentation style from Japan where the speaker has 20 slides to present in 20 seconds each (6 minutes and 40 seconds in total). The format keeps presentation concise and to the point. At the 2016 KWALON conference in Rotterdam,  each qualitative data analysis software company who participated […]

Literature review of biotechnology research in health and agriculture

New geocoding feature of our qualitative analysis software QDA Miner 5

QDA Miner 5 can directly import emails for qualitative analysis

Directly import social media and monitor those sources over time

Reference Management Tools are widely used by researchers and authors the world over to work with large volumes of scholarly documents.

QDA Miner 5 can import and analyze open ended questions from web survey platforms

  Dr. Pepijn Van Houwelingen is a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. It is an interdepartmental, scientific institute that conducts social science research to help the government with its planning and policy development. The main fields studied are health, welfare, social security, the labour market and education with a particular focus on […]

  Most employee surveys use quantitative methods. They ask close-ended questions with respondents answering on a Likert-like scale, satisfied, not satisfied etc. The results are fairly easily gathered and scored/quantified. It has been thus in HR for decades. But by sticking with this process are HR professionals not missing out on the opportunity to get […]

LexisNexis is one of the world’s largest online databases. It contains thousands of publications in areas of law, business, finance, news, government, medicine, and many other subjects. It is a key point of reference for any researcher. The following is an overview of how to import LexisNexis documents into QDA Miner. QDA Miner can split […]