Automated Coding of Open-ended Surveys: Technical and Ethical Issues

This paper presents some technical and ethical issues arising from the use of automated methods to solve a typical social science problem: the coding of surveys including answers to open-ended questions. Coding an open-ended survey, which may include thousands of interviews, means to assign symbolic predefined labels to its answers according to their meaning. The increasing amount of information available from surveys carried out also on the Web, makes it viable the use of (semi)automated systems both to reduce time and human resources cost to analyze and manage it, and to produce results independent from coders' subjective impressions, but on the other hand poses both technical and ethical challenges to be carefully evaluated before being adopted