Agency and Amplification: A Comparison of Manual and Computational Thematic Analyses by Public Health Researchers

Computational techniques offer a means to overcome the amplified complexity and resource-intensity of qualitative research on online communities. However, we lack an understanding of how these techniques are integrated by researchers in practice, and how to address concerns about researcher agency in the qualitative research process. To explore this gap, we deployed the Computational Thematic Analysis Toolkit to a team of public health researchers, and compared their analysis to a team working with traditional tools and methods. Each team independently conducted a thematic analysis of a corpus of comments from Canadian news sites to understand discourses around vaccine hesitancy. We then compared the analyses to investigate how computational techniques may have influenced their research process and outcomes. We found that the toolkit provided access to advanced computational techniques for researchers without programming expertise, facilitated their interaction and interpretation of the data, but also found that it influenced how they approached their thematic analysis.