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January 2025

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Coding qualitative data is a time-consuming and often costly aspect of the survey process. In this post, I will provide feedback on IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys (STAS), which is software designed specifically for coding survey data. The benefits of using this software include improved efficiency and consistency when coding text.

STAS allows you to set up a customizable coding algorithm to code your data. You can create your own coding scheme, or you can use one that is already built in. The built-in coding mechanism can identify responses that mention a place, a name, a positive or negative opinion, an opinion of how affordable an item is, and a number of other types of responses. One benefit of STAS is that it recognizes synonyms and alternative versions of words, making the task of setting up a coding algorithm more efficient.

I recently used STAS for two very different projects and found that it worked great for some purposes and not so great for others. If you are considering STAS, you may want to answer the following questions to inform your decision.

1.      How much data do I have?

STAS is optimized for coding 1,000 responses or fewer, each about 40 characters long. I used it to code about 5,000 open-ended survey responses at a time and it still worked reasonably well.

On the other hand, I also used STAS to code over 100,000 Tweets for research into whether Twitter data can supplement survey data. I set up the coding system (STAS calls this a “Text Analysis Package”) with a subset of Tweets, then I used it to code 25,000 Tweets at a time. Initially, I tried coding all 100,000+ Tweets simultaneously, but STAS could not handle it, so I resigned to coding 25,000 at a time and waiting an hour or two while the process was running. See here and here.

2.      Will I be coding more data?

Depending on how complicated your dataset is, setting up the coding system can take a lot of time. You’ll want to consider whether it is worth the initial time investment to set up the coding system, because for a low volume of complicated data, manual coding may be more efficient. For longitudinal studies especially, it might be worth that initial investment of time because once the system is set up you will be able to code subsequent waves of data with minimal effort.

3.      How much will the responses vary?

I found that STAS worked best for coding demographic data because the range of responses was limited. It worked reasonably well for coding types of injuries (also somewhat limited), but it did not work as well for coding relationships between people. These responses ranged from simple responses such as “mother,” “friend,” or “teacher,” to complicated responses that were typically unrepeated in the dataset. The complicated responses were along the lines of “my best friend’s boyfriend’s step-mom’s boss.” I’m sure STAS can be set up to accurately code these sorts of responses, but I had a hard time figuring it out (see #5 below) and quite frankly, it’s probably more efficient to manually code these responses.

4.      Would I be relying on STAS for sentiment analysis?

STAS is capable of coding sentiment, but I would test it carefully to see how it works with your data. As part of our Twitter research, we manually coded a random sample of 500 Tweets in our dataset and found that STAS sentiment coding was in agreement with manual coding only 44% of the time. STAS would likely perform better with survey data than Tweets, which often use unconventional language, but I would still recommend proceeding with caution if you plan to use STAS for sentiment analysis.

5.      Am I able to take a course on STAS?

It took several days of working with test data and poring over the user’s manual (which I was not impressed with) for me to really figure out what to do with STAS. I know enough about STAS to get by, but I have also come to realize just how much I don’t know about STAS. I encourage you to take a STAS course if you are able. Learning new software is usually easy for me, but without any training, I really struggled with STAS.

If you decide to proceed with STAS for coding your data, here’s one tip as you get started. Run your data through spell check (e.g. in Word or Excel) before importing into STAS. STAS catches many spelling errors, but not all. Anything you can correct will speed up the coding process.

Do you have additional STAS tips to share? Has your experience with STAS been similar to or different than mine? Would you recommend something besides STAS for coding?

Please comment below!

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How is customer service and technical support?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

I recently discovered that IBM bought SPSS a few years ago and is now providing a Text Analytics package called IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys (producing the acronym STAS, which is either a stats package or an STD). I thought I'd take it out for a test drive so I downloaded a 14 day trail version. Before using, I reviewed these excellent tutorials: Analytics Blog and RTI's SurveyPost blog.

For data I could have used their sample data, but I decided to download my Twitter archive. Unfortunately, this caused me some pre-processing hassle. You see, STAS is technically designed for survey data and it expects unstructured language to be in the form of comment responses to questions and it expects those comments to be stored in single cells within a column in a spreadsheet (I see no reason in principle why it couldn't used for analyzing any unstructured data. You just have to package the data in a format SPSS will accept, namely a spreadsheet with the unstructured data all in one column).

Also, STAS does not directly ingests CSV files or Open Office ODC files. Apparently it only accepts inputs of four types: its own file type, Excel, ODBC, and what they call “Data Collection” which I haven't investigated.

Once you open a file, you are asked to drag-and-drop the column name containing your language data into an "Open Ended Text" box (refer to Analytics Blog for screen shots). While I appreciate the simplicity of the drag and drop functionality, my Twitter data had tokens separated into separate columns (which I thought was weird. Let me do my own tokenization, please!). STAS' functional choice means I needed to pre-process my data files. I had to merge the many token columns containing language tokens into a single column. Document pre-processing is common in language analysis, but STAS is supposed to be a platform easy to use for non-engineers. These file ingest and pre-processing steps are tedious and uninteresting and exactly why most people get frustrated. These things can be automated and it is a platform like STAS that ought to be doing this for me.

Also, it seems to only ingest a single file at a time. My Twitter data came to me separated by month so I have 38 files. I can manually merge them, but more work for me. Really no reason STAS can't let me select multiple files all formatted identically, then merge if necessary.

I was surprised and impressed that the software immediately offered me an opportunity to translation non-English comments with a single click. Simple and easy. Quality is what it is with MT. Don't blame STAS if it's a crappy translation. No matter how you slice it, it's a great function. Kudos.

I was super impressed that it will crawl the data and suggest code categories like key concepts. This is essentially topic modeling (though not as sophisticated as something like LDA. The User Guide has a whole chapter devoted to describing the details, but I haven't had time to dig in yet). Color coded clusters of concepts is a very nice function. Colors seem to refer to entity types (Person,. Org, etc). You can collapse all concepts into just the key exemplars of each cluster. There are also several nice filtering options to help you understand what your data is centered around. Here's a screenshot of my final output:

I can see key concept frequencies and filter by that. That's nice. Next steps: Can I see simple word frequencies? Ngrams?

Sentiment analysis can be done with respect to specific categories (food + positive). Pretty easy, but SPSS should mitigate lay people's over-indulgence in sentiment analysis which is tricky and not as easy as this makes it looks. This is where making something easy backfires. How can STAS encourage double checking the data? Gold Standards, sampling, etc.

No doubt, this is easy to use. An academic has the luxury of ignoring people who don't want to learn command line tools or programming languages, but the businessman does not. There's a ton of language data out there owned by thousands of companies and those companies are never going to get their regular employees to learn R just to analyze it. For them, STAS is a legitimate tool that will actually allow the average employee to dig into unstructured data. That's a win.

*In the interest of full disclosure: I do not work for IBM and this is not a sponsored blog in any way. These thoughts are entirely my own. I once worked for IBM briefly over 5 years ago and I still get the occasional IBM recruiter contacting me about opportunities, but this is my personal blog and all content is my own and reflects my honest, personal opinions.

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

I would like SPSS to be integrated with Cloud Pack For Data

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?