Efficient Methods for Sampling Responses from Large-Scale Qualitative Data

Surendra N. Singh

doi:10.1287/mksc.1100.0632

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Efficient Methods for Sampling Responses from Large-Scale Qualitative Data

2011-05-01

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Surendra N. Singh *

Steve Hillmer

Ze Wang

DOI：10.1287/mksc.1100.0632

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Abstract

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The World Wide Web contains a vast corpus of consumer-generated content that holds invaluable insights for improving the product and service offerings of firms. Yet the typical method for extracting diagnostic information from online content-text mining-has limitations. As a starting point, we propose analyzing a sample of comments before initiating text mining. Using a combination of real data and simulations, we demonstrate that a sampling procedure that selects respondents whose comments contain a large amount of information is superior to the two most popular sampling methods-simple random sampling and stratified random sampling-in gaining insights from the data. In addition, we derive a method that determines the probability of observing diagnostic information repeated a specific number of times in the population, which will enable managers to base sample size decisions on the trade-off between obtaining additional diagnostic information and the added expense of a larger sample. We provide an illustration of one of the methods using a real data set from a website containing qualitative comments about staying at a hotel and demonstrate how sampling qualitative comments can be a useful first step in text mining.

Keywords:

consumer-generated media

consumer-generated content

customer feedback on the Web

text mining

qualitative comments

large-scale qualitative data sets

sampling open-ended questions

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