The Future of Coders: Human Judgments in a World of Sophisticated Software

Abstract

This chapter discusses the new methods of using coders as human instruments along with computers in a two-stage procedure that shows promise of avoiding the worst penalties of pure machine analysis as well as the precomputer use of coders. The objective was to develop a coding manual so detailed and specific as to effectively eliminate the influence of human judgment in the coding process. The analogy between the judgment that some text indicates a “pure case of aggression” and the judgment that a rat turned to the right is nothing short of ludicrous. The elimination of subjective, intuitive judgments of meaning from content analysis, then, has been very incomplete in the General Inquirer. The difference between the work of the general inquirers and the coding normally performed by traditional human coders is that the former eliminate intuitive judgments of meaning but rather that in constructing a dictionary they render them wholesale.

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