"It won't work!"
That's what I said to Herb when he
told me about his idea to automatically
code open-ended text responses. I thought
of a hundred reasons why the English
language was too complex for a computer
to evaluate. There were issues of
spelling, grammar, context, singulars and
plurals, tense, possessives,
prepositions, adverbs, adjectives,
sentence construction, and who knows what
else!
But Herb was persistent. He convinced
me to write Verbatim Blaster, the
ultimate automatic open-ended response
coding program. It wasn't easy. I had to
make the computer "understand"
the rules from my old English grammar
textbook. Finally, after several hundred
hours of programming, I was ready to try
it on some real open-ended text. Frankly,
I had no idea how well it would work. But
when I told it to process a file of
open-ended text from a past study, I was
floored!
It took Verbatim Blaster about
20 seconds to analyze 150 open-ended
responses, and the summary it provided
was truly meaningful. I spent about
fifteen minutes refining the response
categories and let Verbatim Blaster
take another crack at it. This time, the
coding was perfect. Originally, I had
spent four hours summarizing the
open-ended responses and Verbatim
Blaster had done the same thing in a
few minutes.
Your time savings with Verbatim
Blaster will be extraordinary! You'll
save hundreds of dollars every time you
use it. Plus, you'll get the added
security of knowing that a consistent
coding scheme is being used for all
respondents.
Verbatim Blaster will change
the way you look at coding verbatim responses.
You'll never worry again about how long
it will take to summarize open-ended
questions from your surveys. They'll
become as easy to analyze as the
quantitative questions.
Even better, Verbatim Blaster
is built right into StatPac for Windows,
so it's easy to create reports with the
coded data. And you'll be able to import
any ASCII text file, even one created
with a word processor.
Does this sound unbelievable? It did
to me...at least until I tried it. I
thought that open-ended responses in my
studies were far too complex for any kind
of automated coding. I didn't believe Verbatim
Blaster would work until I saw it
with my own eyes. That's why I want you
to "see it with your own eyes".
