Analyse chronologies with “Word trends” in MaxQda

How to analyse chronologies in MaxQda? The ‘Trend’ tool is a good way to do so, as explained in this new video available on my YouTube channel.

In this video, I explain how to use MaxQda’s word (and code) ‘Trends’ tool. This tool has a lot of potential and is particularly useful for exploring changes in vocabulary and themes over time, if your documents are in chronological order. Here I use the example of the annual European “State of the Union” to show you the tool, explain how to use it, how to sort the documents in the right order, and a few precautions.

The tool is in the MaxQda visual tools tab. There are both a word trends and a code trends tool.

Word trends

It’s a tool to analyse where and how often some words appear in your documents. You can use it for a single document, multiple documents, document groups, document sets.

• For a single document, the text is divided into sections of equal length, and you get the frequency of the words selected in each section. In the form of a linear chart.
• For multiple documents, you can analyse how the use of some words changes according to your documents. This means that, if your documents are in chronological order, you can see how the use of these words, this vocabulary, changes over time. And that’s interesting, because there are not many tools for doing chronological analyses with MaxQda.
• And instead of multiple documents, you can also use multiple groups of documents or sets of documents.

The tool is interesting even if you just want to compare non-chronological documents. But I find it very interesting when you want to see changes over time, if your documents are in chronological order. For example, maybe you want to study an annual report on a specific topic, or monthly meetings, or press articles on an evolving topic.

Here, I have documents from the European Union, the state of the Union addresses, since 2010. You can imagine that some of the topics, some vocabulary, have been given more or less weight, depending on the time and the situation.

This corpus, these speeches, have not been coded yet. So what I’m showing you is also to explore the documents at the beginning of a research.

Code Tends

It works the exact same way, except that instead of word frequency, you can where and how often your codes have been applied in your documents. Apart from that, it’s exactly the same. You can open it from the same place, and it’s interactive too.

How to sort documents to get them in chronological order

The tool is going to sort them in the order in which they appear in your document list. So you need to sort them from there. It’s easy, here the year is in the title, first thing in the title, so I can simply sort them in alphabetical order.

There is also another classification option, which is to use document groups or sets to classify documents by period or years. You can do this manually or you can use variables to create sets by year or by period.

A word of caution

I think it’s a very interesting tool for exploring data. But, it does have one drawback, which is the type of chart. The thing is that, in terms of semiology/semiotics, a line – like this – should only be used to represent a continuous phenomenon. And the frequency of codes is not a continuous phenomenon. So if you want to follow the basic rules of semiology, you can’t represent them in the form of lines.

It’s not a major flaw if you’re using this tool to explore your data. But it really is something to keep in mind if you plan to use these charts for presentations and reports. Especially in your master’s or PhD dissertations, it’s something that the jury could be critical of.

Are they other tools for chronological or diachronic analysis in Maxqda?

In conclusion, this is another question that I get asked a lot. Are they other tools for chronological or diachronic analysis in Maxqda?

Yes, you can use variables. They are not specific to this type of analysis, but they can be used easily.
The trend tool we’ve seen the main visualisation tool for chronologies. But you can of course use variables to compare periods with other tools from Maxqda.
All you need to do is create a date variable (or simply a number, if you just need the year), and then you can define time periods to be compared, and use the mixed methods tools to do that.