Situations of catastrophic social change, such as COVID-19, raise complex, interdisciplinary research questions that intersect health, education, economics, psychology, and social behavior and require mixed methods research. The pandemic has been a quickly evolving phenomenon, which pressures the time necessary to perform mixed methods research. Natural language processing (NLP) is a promising solution that leverages computational approaches to analyze textual data in “natural language.” The aim of this article is to introduce NLP as an innovative technology to assist with the rapid mixed methods analysis of textual big data in times of catastrophic change. The contribution of this article is illustrating how NLP is a type of mixed methods analysis and making recommendations for its use in mixed methods research.

灾难性社会变化的情况，例如 COVID-19，提出了复杂的跨学科研究问题，这些问题与健康、教育、经济学、心理学和社会行为相交，需要混合方法研究。大流行是一种快速发展的现象，这给进行混合方法研究所需的时间带来了压力。自然语言处理 (NLP) 是一种很有前途的解决方案，它利用计算方法来分析“自然语言”中的文本数据。本文旨在介绍 NLP 作为一项创新技术，以帮助在灾难性变化时期对文本大数据进行快速混合方法分析。本文的贡献是说明 NLP 如何成为一种混合方法分析，并为其在混合方法研究中的使用提出建议。