Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14279/30070
Title: | Validating Wordscores: The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling | Authors: | Bruinsma, Bastiaan Gemenis, Kostas |
Major Field of Science: | Social Sciences | Field Category: | Media and Communications | Keywords: | Wordscores;Text Scaling | Issue Date: | 3-Jul-2019 | Source: | Communication Methods and Measures, 2019, vol. 13, iss. 3, pp. 212 - 227 | Volume: | 13 | Issue: | 3 | Start page: | 212 | End page: | 227 | Journal: | Communication Methods and Measures | Abstract: | Wordscores is a popular computational text analysis method with numerous applications in communication research. Wordscores claims to scale documents on specified dimensions without requiring researchers to read or even understand the language of the input text. We investigate whether Wordscores delivers this claim by scaling the Euromanifestos of 117 political parties across 23 countries on 4 salient dimensions of political conflict. We assess validity by comparing the Wordscores estimates to expert surveys and other judgmental measures, and by examining the Wordscores’s estimates ability to predict party membership in the European Parliament groups. We find that the Wordscores estimates correlate poorly with expert and judgmental measures of party positions, while the latter outperform Wordscores in the predictive validity test. We conclude that Wordscores does not live up to its original claim of a “quick and easy” language blind method, and urge researchers to demonstrate the validity of the method in their domain of interest before any empirical analysis. | URI: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14279/30070 | ISSN: | 19312458 | DOI: | 10.1080/19312458.2019.1594741 | Rights: | © The Author(s) Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International |
Type: | Article | Affiliation : | Scuola Normale Superiore Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies |
Publication Type: | Peer Reviewed |
Appears in Collections: | Άρθρα/Articles |
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Validating Wordscores The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling.pdf | Full text | 2.25 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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