A word count on the sample data set was conducted using ATLAS.ti. Before limitations were set, the program counted all the words in the documents totaling 430 words, including definite and indefinite articles (e.g., a, and, the). After removing the articles and other noninformative words (I, me, it, you, youre, etc.), the word count was still enormous. In my opinion, the only benefit to the word count is to validate codes that have already been identified prior to using the software. Other than that, the word count may overwhelm a novice researcher such as myself. Nonetheless, that is my opinion about the CAQDAS word count function; here is what others had to say.

In their article that gave advice to beginner users of CAQDAS, Niedbalski and lzak (2022) highlighted that a benefit of the word count function is that it helps parse data in pursuit of patterns (differentiating between exceptions and rules). On the other hand, in the same article, it was noted that participants of the study expressed a feeling of being overwhelmed not only by the word count feature but also by the profusion of the overall available features with CAQDAS (Niedbalski & lzak, 2022). The literature also found that word count functions can limit analyst freedom and add too much structure, which goes against the philosophy of qualitative research, resulting in data interpretation weakness that distances the findings from the context of the relationships and scenarios in which they occurred (Soratto, 2020). For this reason, a study may become vulnerable in one or more of the following analysis areas: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Guba & Lincoln, 2001).

Comment on the post and ask question?