Education Commons^™

The Use Of Microcomputer Programs To Improve The Reliability And Validity Of Content Analysis In Evaluation, Richard D. Frisbie

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to advance the body of knowledge about how practicing evaluators can use microcomputer programs to obtain reliable and valid content analyses of responses to open-ended survey questions. This is important because practitioners often analyze such responses as part of larger evaluation efforts. To address this general problem, content analysis experts have developed methods of survey and discovery to help delineate new category systems and obtain codes for responses based on existing categories. Fortunately, some of the methods can be implemented with general purpose microcomputer programs. For example, key words out of context--word lists--can be …