What the study analyzed
Federal workforce responses to a return-to-office mandate affecting over 1 million employees. As the authors note, manual coding of a corpus this large would have been impractical.
How Evidano fit the workflow
A documented, human-in-the-loop workflow
- 1Import
All 39,788 comments were imported into Evidano for AI-assisted coding.
- 2Code against your codebook
The tool coded comments against the researchers' predefined thematic grid, clustering passages by meaning. It produced a coding matrix with exemplar excerpts and text-level justifications for each decision.
- 3Human validation
The team reviewed classifications and manually verified a random 15% sample. No major misclassifications remained after refinement.
- 4Interpret
Researchers interpreted the validated themes within their conceptual framework. The tool organized material; the analysis stayed with the team.
“Rather than relying on keyword matching, Evidano identifies conceptual patterns based on contextual meaning, clustering related passages even when they do not share identical vocabulary.”
“This design ensured that AI augmented rather than replaced expert qualitative judgment, limiting automation bias while preserving analytical rigor.”
“The study demonstrates the value of AI-assisted qualitative analysis for examining large-scale administrative phenomena while retaining interpretive depth.”
From bottleneck to scalable analysis
Coding tens of thousands of comments by hand is impractical. Coder drift and fatigue build up at scale. Reproducing the exact process is difficult.
Codes the full corpus against your codebook. Deterministic outputs reduce drift and fatigue. Researchers review, validate, and stay in control.
Researchers reviewed and refined every classification.
Text-level justifications enabled auditing and contestation.
Deterministic, version-locked inference yields identical outputs.
About Evidano (previously AILYZE)
Evidano is AI-assisted qualitative data analysis software for interviews, focus groups, open-ended survey responses, and documents. It supports AI-assisted thematic analysis with your own or an AI-suggested codebook, transcription and translation in 100+ languages, clickable quotes and citations, and exportable visual reports. End-to-end encryption, no third-party data sharing, and your data is not used to train AI. From USD 50/month for unlimited analysis.
Run the first pass in days, not weeks
Keep the judgment with you. Let Evidano do the heavy lifting on your interviews, focus groups, open-ended responses, and documents.
More case studies
AI-assisted qualitative analysis is now in the published record
A 2026 study coded 5,211 federal-worker comments with AI, then reviewed every result by hand. See how the workflow held up.
AI-assisted qualitative analysis is moving into published research
A published Naval Postgraduate School thesis surfaced 62 concepts from 799 interview excerpts, then refined them by hand.
AI-assisted thematic analysis, used in published research
A peer-reviewed 2025 study disclosed Evidano for thematic analysis of qualitative focus group data.