Big Meaning: Qualitative Analysis on Large Bodies of Data Using AI

This study introduces a framework that leverages AI-generated descriptive codes to indicate a text's fecundity--the density of unique human-generated codes--in thematic analysis. Rather than replacing human interpretation, AI-generated codes guide the selection of texts likely to yield richer qualitative insights. Using a dataset of 2,530 Malaysian news articles on refugee attitudes, we compare AI-selected documents to randomly chosen ones by having three human coders independently derive codes. The results demonstrate that AI-selected texts exhibit approximately twice the fecundity. Our findings support the use of AI-generated codes as an effective proxy for identifying documents with a high potential for meaning-making in thematic analysis.