Once again, we have necessity to thank for spurring invention. After years of frustration dealing with open-ended questions, researcher Jim Falk vowed to figure out a way to simplify the task of coding and working with written responses. The result is something he calls the Text Analysis Program, or TAP.TAP uses proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to group written responses into text clusters for easier analysis. In effect, the program does the coding and sorting of written responses for you.As Falk, executive director of Com stat Research Corp., Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., states it in the program' s literature: "TAP 'understands' the meaning of words and groups written statements contextually. It labels each text cluster with the most representative statement and it provides summary statistics to show how many individual statements formed the cluster along with an index of internal consistency."A typist enters the answers into the computer, inserting delimiters to separate the responses to each question and adding demographic information to each response so users can analyze how groups of respondents answered the various questions."If we have a four item questionnaire, for example," Falk says, "you would have the respondent's statements for each item and following that would be the demographic codes associated with that individual. And when I go to extract the data for analysis, if you give it specific demographic criteria, it will only extract that data which pertains to that demographic combination."The program works best with short answers to specific questions. If the person rambles, Falk instructs the typist to shorten the answers.TAP is currently available as a service from Comstat but Falk is preparing to offer it under license as a pro¬gram for the UNIX operating system. Plans for a DOS version are also in the works once Falk is able to get around the multitasking limitations of DOS.
The program...