The Millennium Cohort Study is a longitudinal cohort study designed in the late 1990s to evaluate how military service may affect long-term health. To perform these analyses, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was applied to a broad open-ended question asking the participant if there were any additional health concerns.
7th Space Interactive brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Application of Latent Semantic Analysis for Open-Ended Responses in a Large, Epidemiologic Study.” The purpose of this investigation was to examine characteristics of Millennium Cohort Study participants who responded to the open-ended question, and identify and investigate the most commonly reported areas of concern.
Using this technology provided results that revealed participants who provided information in the open-ended text field had significantly lower self-reported general health compared with those who did not provide information in the open-ended text field.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
