The purpose of this paper is to develop a visualization method for texts produced by a company's competitors, partners, or customers. This method can be used for competitive…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a visualization method for texts produced by a company's competitors, partners, or customers. This method can be used for competitive intelligence purposes, and in particular, for spotting changes over time in a company's communication.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the judgments of expert readers, topics considered to be important in the quarterly reports of two telecommunication companies were turned into so‐called collocational networks, using a statistical method originating in linguistics.
Findings
The paper shows that when collocational topic networks are produced out of a sequence of quarterly reports, they provide a visualization of how the presentation of these topics changes from one‐quarter to the next.
Research limitations/implications
The statistical method used in this paper does not handle low‐frequency topics, that nevertheless might be of great importance, very well. The method could be developed further so that users' judgments of importance are given more weight.
Practical implications
The method developed in this paper can be turned into a data visualization tool for intelligence practitioners.
Originality/value
Textual data are often overlooked in competitive intelligence, as it is more difficult to visualize and present than quantitative data, such as financial ratios. The method presented here is an easy to grasp “white box” approach to visualizing textual data, as it combines the judgments of subject matter experts with a statistical method.
Details
Keywords
Camilla Malm, Stefan Andersson, Håkan Jönson, Lennart Magnusson and Elizabeth Hanson
In Sweden, the care of older people and people with disabilities is increasingly carried out by informal carers, often family members, who are unpaid and outside a professional or…
Abstract
Purpose
In Sweden, the care of older people and people with disabilities is increasingly carried out by informal carers, often family members, who are unpaid and outside a professional or formal framework. While there is an increasing awareness of the role of carers within service systems and their own needs for support, their involvement in research is underexplored. The purpose of this paper is to explore carers’ views and experiences of involvement in research and development (R&D) work.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative study was conducted, consisting of 12 individual interviews with carers from different local Swedish carer organizations.
Findings
Core findings included carers’ discussions of the perceived challenges and benefits of their involvement in research, both generally and more specifically, in the context of their involvement in the development of a national carer strategy.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations included the relative lack of male carer participants and the convenience sample.
Practical implications
Authentic carer involvement in research demands a high level of engagement from researchers during the entire research process. The provided CRAC framework, with reference to the themes community, reciprocity, advocacy and circumstantiality, may help researchers to understand and interpret carer involvement in research and provide the prerequisites for their involvement.
Originality/value
There is a dearth of studies that systematically examine carer involvement in research. This paper attempts to redress this gap by providing a nuanced analysis of carer involvement in R&D work from the perspective of carers themselves.