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American Sociological Association

The Difficulty of Mixedmethod Approaches

Author(s): Roberto Franzosi
Source: Sociological Methodology, Vol. 42 (August 2012), pp. 79-81
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23409342
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 A. A
Symposium: Commentary AMERICAN
SOCIOLOGICAL
ASSOCIATION

Sociological Methodology
Volume 42, 79-81
The Difficulty of Mixed ) American Sociological Association 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0081 175012460850
method Approaches http://sm.sagepub.com

(DSAGE

Roberto Franzosi1

On July 9—10, 2012, Professor Martin Bauer organized a third conference on text

mining at the London School of Economics. Invited participants came from computer
science and differentsocial science disciplines. They were united by a common inter
est in texts and the extraction of meaning from those texts. They were divided by the

way they approached those texts—their methods, a marker of more fundamental epis

temological differences. Social scientists ranged in their approach. There are

the content analysts who rely on CAQDAS packages to deal with text, either qualita

tively, employing CAQDAS only as an organizational tool, or quantitatively, query

ing the codes they produce in CAQDAS for cross-relations, exporting the results, and
analyzing these in statistical packages (SPSS, STATA, R), as do Michael White,
Maya Judd, and Simone Poliandri (this volume, 2012:43—76). There are those who
distance themselves from the text, relying on semi-automated approaches in the
French tradition of analyse des données (e.g., using such software as Alceste or

Lebart's Dtm-Vic). The larger the body of text to be analyzed, the more likely social
scientists are to look for automatic, quantitative solutions. And that's where social

and computer scientists meet. The textual analysis tools that computer science data

miners have developed tend to work well only when dealing with "millions of
words," as Professor Nello Cristianini, a computer scientist at Bristol, UK, put it at

the conference: "Modern AI is driven by large text corpora." Their algorithms do

allow them to reveal important properties of content, whether about topic, style, or

even narrative structure. It is that narrative structure (the sequence of SVO of actors

and their actions), that I painfully extract from text by hand, in my Quantitative
Narrative Analysis approach—an approach that falls squarely in the category of those

who treat text qualitatively but analyze the results quantitatively. Contrary to purely

qualitative scholars, I am hoping (and optimistic) that computer scientists will one
day put us out of our misery of hand coding.
Thus, ultimately, I share what the authors write about CAQDAS approaches: that

"the researcher always has ready access to the underlying qualitative data (e.g.,

1
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Roberto Franzosi, Emory University
Email: rfranzo@emory.edu

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80 SociologicalMethodology 42

original text)" (p. 48) and that "quantitative and qualitative analytical processes can
be employed iteratively and interactively, allowing the researcher to identify emer
gent themes and insights, and ultimately produce results difficult to achieve using
one method alone" (emphasis added, p. 61). I have stressed that same point in sev
eral publications and use it (effectively?) as a research strategy in my contribution to
this symposium.
I share their view that quantitative analyses of textual material (yet, is a network
graph or a GIS map really quantitative?) "allow us to observe patterns of response
difficult to see using the qualitative software alone" (p. 60). After all, that is the pur
pose of data analysis (of texts) for social scientists: to draw inferences not about texts
as such but of some social reality they represent. In that, we fundamentally differ

from linguists, literary critics, and rhetoricians who look at texts qua texts.

Finally, I share their pessimistic conclusion that "the advancement of mixed

methods and related design has been more elusive than one might otherwise imag
ine" (p. 61). And for good reasons, speaking from experience. I still remember my
bewilderment (and embarrassment, how could I not know this?) at an ASA meeting
back in the 1980s. When talking about my project to Roger Gould (sit tibi terra
levis!) and about my plan to use regression and logistic models for data analysis, he
said: "That's fine. But your data are perfect for network models." Network models?
I had never heard of such things, despite my training as a statistician/econometrician.
And none of my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, perhaps the
most methodologically sophisticated sociology department in the United States at the
time, ever suggested network models to me. If anything, some of them were asking:
"What's Franzosi gonna do with thousands of words in the computer?" It is,perhaps
ironic that today's computer scientists should need "millions of words" in their
computers. And I certainly still remember the (ongoing) painful climb to learn lin
guistics and, later, rhetoric. After all, this is what Aaron Cicourel wrote that I should

focus on rather than Artificial Intelligence in the firstreview of my "From Words to

Numbers" approach (1989, in this same journal). Linguistics? What was that?
Indeed, I do wonder what linguists and rhetoricians would think about the social and
computer scientists' dabbling with texts. Alas, they were not present at the confer

ence. Next time!

One can come away from these meetings with the feeling of having been involved
in a dialogue if not among deaf, at least among skeptics or, better yet, among scho
lars who live in differentworlds and simply do not understand each other—one good
reason for the dialogue to continue, if we want to learn each other's language, each

other's culture. But also with a feeling of hope, a feeling I first experienced in a
whirlwind tour across Europe during the summer of 2012 teaching workshops on
QNA. Workshop participants, even when open to a nonqualitative treatment of their
data, were often at a loss for information. What's to be done "with thousands of
words in the computer?" The range of tools required, in methodological (and soft
ware) expertise, is beyond the tool kit of the average social scientist. Most sociology
departments still rely on quantitative training based on standard regression, with a

few variants of log-linear modeling, multilevel modeling, or categorical data

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Franzosi 81

analysis. But, at least in narrative analysis, the tools required are more likely to be

network models (to map the relations between actors via their actions), sequence

analysis (to highlight any invariant sequential pattern of actions across events), or
even the even more esoteric (for us) GIS tools (geographic information systems, to
map in space and time actors' actions). It is imperative, for the sake of a broader
adoption of mixed-method approaches, that software developers directly connect

data results produced in their software with other types of software (particularly

open-source software) and with online help on what to do when the software opens

up and users find themselves in unfamiliar territory.But if they like what they see,
users are likely to become more adventurous and explore the territory. This will at

least give the uninformed user an idea of what else is possible. As the authors say:
"With the advent of new software, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches may
represent a significant opportunity to augment knowledge. ... It should be easy to

brighten this bulb" (p. 66). We can only hope. Unless, as Elton wrote about tradi
tional and scientific historians, qualitative and quantitative historians, we are happy
that "each will go to heaven his own way" (1983:83).

References

Fogel, Robert and Geoffrey Elton. 1983. Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

White, M., M. D. Judd, and S. Poliandri. 2012. "Illumination with a Dim Bulb? What Do
Social Scientists Learn by Employing Qualitative Data Analysis Software in the Service of
Multimethod Designs?" Sociological Methodology 42:43—76.

Bio
The author's biography can be found on page 41 of this volume.

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