Understanding the perceptions and experiences of a community regarding disasters is crucial in effectively planning and implementing disaster strategies. There are two known approaches to analyzing perceptions, qualitative and automated approaches for thematic analysis. This paper aims to investigate the strengths and limitations of the mentioned approaches. Thus, using both approaches, this study analyzed data from a focus group discussion about disaster risk reduction and management and climate change adaptation conducted in a typhoon-prone city in Legazpi City, Philippines. An inductive-deductive approach for the qualitative method while a language model-assisted approach for the automatic method of extracting prominent themes from the collected responses. The results show (dis) similarities regarding themes obtained from the two approaches, specifically the emphasis on concerns about the proper distribution of relief goods and donations, proper early monitoring of potentially powerful typhoons, and other forms of threat, including politically motivated ones. From these findings, we conclude the importance of incorporating a combined manual and automatic approach for thematic analysis of natural language.