One promising approach to the analysis of qualitative information is the use of tag clouds.
Tag clouds are a visual representation of user-generated tags, typically using font size to reflect the frequency of the tag. Refinements including "fading" older words and replacing actual words by their root (E.g. "promised", "promises", "promising", and "promise" might be grouped under "promises".)
The folks at Revelation, for example, already use clouds to analyze the tags that researchers have applied to respondent-generated material.
But tag cloud generators can work with any textual material, including transcripts. Bulletin board focus groups, with the sometimes staggering amount of information that they generate, might be prime candidates for this kind of tool.
I ran a tag cloud on two bulletin board projects I conducted, one with nutritionists and another with cheese lovers using the (free) tag cloud generator at wordle.
Check it out: I think this approach holds great promise.
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