Text Analysis as a Tool for a Coordinated Community Response: Keeping Safety for Battered Women and their Children at the Center

This guide assumes that someone from the advocacy field has been assigned the task of managing a text analysis project as part of a coordinated community response. It has been written to assist that person in identifying, gathering, and analyzing text with an interagency work group. It is not intended for general distribution, but contains templates that the coordinator can adapt and provide to those involved in a text analysis project.

You—the text analysis project coordinator—will find information in the guide about locating text, securing agreements, addressing confidentiality issues, analyzing various types of text, and managing the information your team collects and analyzes. You will find exercises to help you become more familiar with text analysis techniques.

The text analysis process described in this guide was developed by Ellen Pence, from the institutional ethnography work of sociologist Dorothy E. Smith.