Thread: Methods: How to reduce a categorization

I have done a survey and one of the questions asks an open question on the problems that companies have. I used text analysis software to create a classification of problems. This resulted in a classification of 30 problems. For follow-up analyses I will need to bring down this classification to, for example, 10 problems by combining problems together into more abstract categories. The question I would like to ask is how to do this reduction into less categories?

One method would be to this myself intuitively. However, this is very subjective.
Another method would be to use some kind of card-sorting technique...?

Can anyone offer me advice on how to reduce the categorization in fewer categories as objectively as possible? Are there some useful techniques from social science to do this?

Thank you in advance!