The Meaning Extraction Method: An Approach to Evaluate Content Patterns From Large-Scale Language Data

Qualitative content analyses often rely on a top-down approach to understand themes in collection of texts. A codebook prescribes how humans should judge if text fits theme based rules and judgment criteria. approaches are challenging because they require many resources (e.g., coders, training, rounds coding), can be affected by researcher or coder bias, may miss meaningful patterns that deviate from the codebook, use subsample data. complementary, bottom-up approach—the Meaning Extraction Method—has been popular social psychology but rarely applied communication research. This paper outlines value Method, concluding with guide conduct massive complete datasets, quantitatively. The Method is performed public published archive pet adoption profiles demonstrate approach. Considerations for research offered.