This article presents a method for computer-assisted text analysis, which has been employed by the author in a number of studies. The inductive methodology is based on a frequency count analysis of the co-occurrence of words; and a visualization of the results of this text analysis in a two dimensional space.
The main advantage of this text analysis technique is its potential for (a) exploring large amounts of textual data without any pre-coded or theoretically laden vocabularies or thesauri; and (b) the extraction of discursive patterns often only detectable in an a posteriori expert analysis.