LLMs can produce many qualitative codes, but not all of them carry meaning. This article looks at what Gemma2 and Llama3.1 actually add to thematic analysis.

AI Agents in Online Surveys If you run online surveys today, there is a good chance your respondents come from an online recruitment platform. These platforms now sit behind a large share of behavioral research, shaping academic work in psychology, public health, economics, and political science. They also support consequential commercial decisions in product design and public communication. But the rise of large language models (LLMs) has made an old concern feel newly urg

Why GATOS Matters Qualitative data are often where social scientists go when numbers are not enough. Open-ended survey responses, interviews, and written reflections can capture forms of meaning that are difficult to reduce to numbers. As Saldaña (2011) argues, qualitative data analysis is fundamentally a process of meaning-making: researchers construct patterns, identify relationships, and move between inductive and deductive forms of reasoning. The difficulty is that this