A Method to Scale-Up Interpretative Qualitative Analysis, with an Application to Aspirations in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh

The qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews has vast potential in economics but has found limited use. This is partly because the interpretative, nuanced human reading of text and coding that it requires is labor intensive and very time consuming. This paper presents a method to simplify and shorten the coding process by extending a small set of interpretative human-codes to a larger, representative, sample using natural language processing and thus analyze qualitative data at scale. It applies it to analyze 2,200 open-ended interviews on parent’s aspirations for children with Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts. It shows that studying aspirations with open-ended interviews extends the economics focus on material goals to ideas from philosophy and anthropology that emphasize aspirations for moral and religious values, and the navigational capacity to achieve these aspirations. The paper shows how to assess the robustness and reliability of this approach and finds that extending the sample of interviews, rather than the human-coded training set, is likely to be optimal.