This piece is a response to the Conway, Conway, Gornick, and Houck (2014) description of an automated method for assessing integrative complexity. It builds on the authors' 15 years of experience in automating a variety of textual analysis coding schemes including that measuring conceptual complexity and is intended to address some of the issues raised in the process of automating content analysis categories.KEY WORDS: integrative complexity, conceptual complexity, automated content analysis Conway and his associates have our full and enthusiastic support in their efforts to automate the coding of Integrative Complexity (IC) as automation will increase the quantity and improve the quality, transparency, and replicability of available data. Along the way, they have created their own automated coding infrastructure and encountered a number of obstacles. Fortunately, many of those obstacles can be mitigated, if not completely overcome, by moving from the single-pass coding approach that they are presently using to a multiple-pass approach. Although multiple-pass text-analysis systems cannot solve all the problems Conway, Conway, Gornick, and Houck (2014) have encountered, such a system would make the journey to a satisfactory automated IC both faster and more comfortable. We will tackle a number of the issues that Conway and his colleagues have faced based on more than 15 years of experience automating a variety of text-analysis coding schemes, including the conceptual complexity measure (CC) to which they refer. We will also consider the opportunities that such automation provides for expanding our knowledge about integrative complexity.
Examples of Single-and Multiple-Pass SystemsThe IC automated system developed by Conway and his associates (written in Visual Basic underneath an Excel template) appears to be a "single-pass matching" system that relies on matching lists of words or phrases to those presumed to assess various categories of integrative complexity. This general approach, often referred to as a dictionary approach,