Process & Methodology

CALCAT™

CALCAT™ stands for Computer Aided Language Context Analysis Tool.  It is software that supports the coding process, where qualitative data is quantified.  It is used by coders to identify and organize recurring thoughts, frustrations, needs, or ideas, so that meaningful analyses can be produced from open-ended questions and then accessed, interactively, through CommunitasOffice.   CALCAT™ helps Communitas read customer or employee interviews and quantify their thoughts and feelings while retaining the words they used.  As you might imagine, CALCAT^TM is extremely important in getting to the central themes and beliefs that develop among groups, communities, constituencies.

CALCAT^TM is unique in three key ways:

1. All of the respondents’ actual language is retained, allowing the client to click on a label in a chart or graph later on in the process and instantly view the actual language that represented by that label. 
   

2. CALCAT^TM employs a hierarchical structure for categorizing data, giving us the ability to produce graphs with distinct levels of detail.  For example, ideas like “friendly staff” and “reliable technical support” may be grouped together in a category called “customer service”.   When you view the charts in CommunitasOffice, you have the ability to select the level of detail you would like to see.
   

3. Unlike other technologies that claim to automate the analysis of the ideas contained within a text, CALCAT^TM does not rely solely on computer analysis.  CALCAT is “computer aided” but rest assured that each and every response is human-read by our team of trained coders, making it possible for our analyses to be far more subtle, precise, and accurate than anything a computer is capable of producing.