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Main Authors: De Paoli, Stefano, Mathis, Walter Stan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03239
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author De Paoli, Stefano
Mathis, Walter Stan
author_facet De Paoli, Stefano
Mathis, Walter Stan
contents This paper presents a set of reflections on saturation and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for performing Thematic Analysis (TA). The paper suggests that initial thematic saturation (ITS) could be used as a metric to assess part of the transactional validity of TA with LLM, focusing on the initial coding. The paper presents the initial coding of two datasets of different sizes, and it reflects on how the LLM reaches some form of analytical saturation during the coding. The procedure proposed in this work leads to the creation of two codebooks, one comprising the total cumulative initial codes and the other the total unique codes. The paper proposes a metric to synthetically measure ITS using a simple mathematical calculation employing the ratio between slopes of cumulative codes and unique codes. The paper contributes to the initial body of work exploring how to perform qualitative analysis with LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03239
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reflections on Inductive Thematic Saturation as a potential metric for measuring the validity of an inductive Thematic Analysis with LLMs
De Paoli, Stefano
Mathis, Walter Stan
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
This paper presents a set of reflections on saturation and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for performing Thematic Analysis (TA). The paper suggests that initial thematic saturation (ITS) could be used as a metric to assess part of the transactional validity of TA with LLM, focusing on the initial coding. The paper presents the initial coding of two datasets of different sizes, and it reflects on how the LLM reaches some form of analytical saturation during the coding. The procedure proposed in this work leads to the creation of two codebooks, one comprising the total cumulative initial codes and the other the total unique codes. The paper proposes a metric to synthetically measure ITS using a simple mathematical calculation employing the ratio between slopes of cumulative codes and unique codes. The paper contributes to the initial body of work exploring how to perform qualitative analysis with LLMs.
title Reflections on Inductive Thematic Saturation as a potential metric for measuring the validity of an inductive Thematic Analysis with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03239