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Table 2 Glossary of terms used by Leximancer vs. qualitative analysis

From: Gender and active travel: a qualitative data synthesis informed by machine learning

Leximancer terminology

Description

Common qualitative thematic analysis terminology

Description

Term

Words in the text that have been examined for frequency of co-occurrence with other words and synonyms from the thesaurus and are weighted or scored according to evidence that a concept is present in a sentence.

Content code

Basic unit of meaning.

Concept

Collections of words or ‘terms’ that travel together within the text. They are parent terms that have been identified through semantic and relational word extraction that share similar meaning and/or space within the text.

Sub-category

Descriptive family of codes

Theme

Emergent concept groups that are highly connected, parent concepts.

Category

Defining or conceptual labels for family of codes.

  

Theme

Overarching category based on interpretive, theoretical, conceptual insight of researcher.

‘Important’

The hierarchy of ‘importance’ indicates concept connectedness.

Meaningful, interpretive, important

Basis for theoretical understanding of the data; particularly pertinent or revealing in relation to the research question.