Import news and comments from Reddit with QDA Miner 5 September 5, 2017 - Blogs on Text Analytics

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 Front Page of the Internet because the content is generated and voted up and down by the users. Some of them are very dedicated people. One of the main features of Reddit is the comments Redditors make about different subjects. For example, Reddit recently asked its users to weigh in on Net Neutrality in the U.S. The request generated thousands of responses. The site is now in the top 5 of social media sites in the U.S. This one of the reasons we made it possible to easily use QDA Miner 5 to import Reddit content for analysis.

Begin by creating a project in QDA Miner 5. The qualitative analysis software will present you with a menu. Select Import from datafiles or web services, Social media, and then choose Reddit.

If you select to import Reddit you will see the following screen. You will be asked to search for Posts, URL of a post, or subreddits.

If you select Posts you will see the following Tab. You will be able to select posts and fill in a list of variables as well as other parameters. It will import comments from the selected posts into a QDA Miner project.

Reddit will allow you to go back into its database to retrieve information. We have created a monitoring feature that allows you to monitor Reddit content in the background if you wish. To do this you click the box Live Monitoring, then set the frequency and the stop date, and QDA Miner will update your Reddit content based on the last time you imported from the site.

Once the documents are imported into QDA Miner, you will be prompted to give the project a name. You are ready to begin your qualitative analysis.

Data from Reddit feeds can be useful in communication research known as media framing, which is focused on how the media represents a specific topic and what are the factors that may exert influence on the process. To find out more about how QDA Miner and WordStat can aid in this research, go to the webpage What is Media Framing Analysis?

If you have other suggestions for ways we can help you analyze social media sites please let us know by leaving a message on this blog.