Quantitative Text Analysis Research Articles

ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЙ О СУЩНОСТИ МЕСТНОГО САМОУПРАВЛЕНИЯ В ОБЩЕСТВЕННО-ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ

The article analyzes the socio-political discourse of local self-government in the post-Soviet period of Russia’s development. The aim was to study the transformation of ideas about the functions of local government in the socio-political discourse of 2014-2023. The research method was quantitative and qualitative content analysis of texts. As it turned out, in the associative series with the concept of “local self-government”, word forms associated with the meanings of local democracy, civil society, democracy, and political participation of citizens were least used. To a much greater extent, the concept of local self-government turned out to be associated with concepts describing it as local public administration related to the performance of the function of providing services to the population, solving socio-economic problems. As a result of the study, the hypothesis was confirmed that the idea of transforming local self-government is the lowest link in the system of public power has support in political discourse. In the public consciousness, the function of this institution as a “school of democracy” was almost completely replaced by the idea of it as a “grassroots” management unit, engaged mainly in providing services to the population and solving socio-economic problems. Such a painless rejection of the democratic component in a broader context confirms the hypothesis that the formation of local self-government in the first half of the 1990s was not democratic, but politically situational in nature, associated with the interests of a relatively small number of actors, the lack of formation of local communities in the post-Soviet period, and the weakness of the “middle class”, therefore unable to become social the base of local government. This gave rise to the objective inevitability of the subsequent evolution of the institute of local self-government into the “lower floor” of the regional public administration system, bringing the “superstructure” institute of political management in line with its basic basis.

Cultural framing of giftedness in recent US fictional texts.

A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals' perceptions of and attitudes towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally constructed concept, most examination of the term's meanings and implications has used reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents' giftedness-related perceptions and attitudes within the context of formal education. To provide a better understanding of the cultural meanings associated with giftedness-the term's cultural framing-we investigated the depiction of giftedness within a professional cultural product removed from education, namely, a large corpus of US fictional texts. We examined patterns of word usage in the vicinity of the term gift*, when used in the dictionary senses related to giftedness, in a large corpus of US fictional texts of recent decades, consisting of 485,179 text samples and 1,002,889,754 word tokens. Via inductive methods of quantitative text analysis, we explored themes occurring in the vicinity of gift*; and with an existing lookup dictionary, we assessed deductively the overall emotional valance of the writing near gift*. Our investigation revealed ways in which the literary exploration of giftedness coheres with and distinguishes itself from the outlooks on giftedness noted for survey-based research in education settings. In fictional texts, giftedness evinces special associations with humanities domains and beauty and, on balance, correlates positively with emotionally positive words.

Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Incident Reporting and Elucidating the Characteristics of Incident Reports for COVID-19 Patients at the Critical Care Center of a Tertiary-Care Teaching Hospital in Japan.

The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has necessitated the establishment of new medical care systems worldwide. Medical staff treating COVID-19 patients perform their care duties in highly challenging and psychologically demanding situations, raising concerns about their impact on patient safety. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and characterize incident reports related to COVID-19 patients to clarify the impact of COVID-19 on patient safety. The study included data from 557 patients admitted to the Critical Care Center of a tertiary-care teaching hospital in Osaka, Japan, from April 2020 to March 2021. The patients were divided into two groups: COVID-19 (n = 106) and non-COVID-19 (n = 451) and compared based on various characteristics, incident reporting rates, and the content of incident reports. The findings indicated a significantly higher rate of patients with incident reports in the COVID-19 group compared to the non-COVID-19 group (49.1% vs. 24.4%, P < 0.001). In addition, quantitative text analysis revealed that the topic ratio, consisting of "respiration," "circuit," "settings," "connection," "nursing," "ventilator," "control," "tape," "Oxylog®," and "artificial nose" was significantly higher in the incident reports of the COVID-19 group (P = 0.003). In conclusion, COVID-19 patients are more susceptible to adverse incidents and may face a higher risk of patient safety issues. The characteristic topics in incident reports involving COVID-19 patients primarily revolved around ventilator-related issues. In the future, the methodology used in the current study may be utilized to identify incident characteristics and implement appropriate countermeasures in the event of unknown patient safety issues.

Identity Construction and Speech Acts in Ernaux’s The Years: A Corpus-based Feminist Stylistic Analysis

The present study explores the construction of the female identity in The Years, in comparison with the original French text Les Années, which is one of the novels written by the French author; Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022. The study also investigates the relationship between identity construction in the selected novel and the occurrences and frequencies of the different types of speech acts used by the protagonist. As a result, it highlights how the structure of the utterances said by the female protagonist and the types of speech acts with an illocutionary force contributes to the comprehensive portrayal of the female character.The qualitative and quantitative textual analysis employs a triangulation of a number of analytical tools and theoretical frameworks, such as feminist stylistics, pragmatics, and social psychology, with a corpus-based approach. The underlying theories used in the present study are the Speech Act Theory (1962,1979), the Positioning Theory (1990) integrating with Mills’ (1995) framework of feminist stylistics. Findings demonstrate that two types of speech acts are frequently used and distributed in the selected novel; that is, expressive and directive in order to highlight the fact that the narrator intends to express her directions, compliments, and complaints about events and actions. Different positions are assigned to both the narrator and the protagonist in order to manifest the different identities constructed.

The Disinformation Reaction to the Russia–Ukraine War

The beginning of the war in Ukraine generated a wave of disinformation in Europe. Our research intends to cognise the reaction of disinformation agents to the outbreak of war, analysing publications checked by Iberian fact-checkers during the first ten days of the conflict. Specifically, we used Voyant Tools online software to perform a quantitative textual analysis, which allowed us to survey the most relevant topics, formats for spreading disinformation and media platforms. We also analysed the presence of political leaders, countries and military terminologies. Our findings indicate that video is the most common format to disseminate disinformation content, namely, to illustrate war scenarios. In addition, our research also showed that online video platforms, especially YouTube, are closer to terms that portray military actions. This may have implications for fostering a warmongering feeling. Finally, we found that the fake content checked was mostly favourable to Ukraine, which raises new poignant arguments for the contemporary debate about disinformation in war.

Research on the efficacy and effect assessment of deep-sea aquaculture policies in China: Quantitative analysis of policy texts based on the period 2004–2022

Deep-sea aquaculture, as an emerging industry, requires the support of relevant policies for its development. To assess the efficacy of the policies enacted by the Chinese government on deep-sea aquaculture and the effect of policy implementation, we collect policy documents produced by the Chinese government that promote the development of deep-sea aquaculture from 2004 to 2022 and categorize them into three types of policy tools, namely, supply-type, demand-type, and environment-type policies. An assessment model is established with three dimensions, namely, policy power, policy goals, and policy tools, to quantitatively analyze policy efficacy and assess the policy implementation effect of the 109 policy documents. The research results show that the number of policy documents on deep-sea aquaculture policy is generally on the rise, and the number of policies drives its annual overall efficacy, which fluctuates widely. The annual average efficacy is low and fluctuates little. In the three dimensions of policy tools, supply-type policies exhibit a higher overall efficacy than environmental-type and demand-type policies. In terms of the implementation effect, there is a deviation between the government's policy preferences and the actual effectiveness of the policy tools. The current policy regime is dominated by supply-type policies, while the implementation effect of policy tools shows that demand-type policies have a better promotional effect on the industry.

Words count in psychotherapy: Differentiating language characteristics of cognitive behavioral therapy and focal psychodynamic therapy for anorexia nervosa.

It is generally assumed that psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) differ in terms of applied techniques and processes. To date, however, little is known about whether and how such differences can actually be observed at a basic linguistic level and in what the two treatment approaches differ most strongly (i.e., how psychodynamic and CBT therapists differ in what they actually say word-by-word in therapy sessions). Building on theoretical models and previous research that used observer ratings, we formulated specific hypotheses regarding which word categories psychodynamic and CBT therapists who treat patients with an eating disorder should differ in. To investigate these hypotheses, we used verbatim transcripts from 297 therapy sessions of a randomized controlled trial in which patients with anorexia nervosa (n = 88) received either focal psychodynamic therapy (FPT) or CBT. These transcripts were then examined using computerized quantitative text analysis. In line with our hypotheses, we found that CBT therapists overall spoke more than their FPT counterparts and that they used more words related to eating. Also in line with our hypotheses, FPT therapists used more words related to social processes. Contrary to our expectations, CBT therapists did not show a stronger focus on the future but talked more about emotions than FPT therapists. The latter effect, however, appears to be driven by a stronger focus on positive emotions. These findings suggest that computerized quantitative text analysis can differentiate meaningful language characteristics of CBT and FPT on spoken-word level and that it holds potential as a tool for researchers and therapists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Institutional Formation in Tumultuous Times: Reforming English Social Housing Regulation Post-Grenfell

English social housing regulation theoretically exists to promote the social purpose of the sector, yet the success of regulation against this objective has been questioned amidst concerns with the quality of service provided by landlords. Following the Grenfell Tower fire, the government initiated a reform process to reverse a policy of regulatory passivity on consumer standards. This paper conceives of regulatory reform as a case of institutional formation; a dynamic process that shapes conduct via rules, practices and narratives. It fills an empirical gap on how regulatory practice has responded to an ambiguous institutional environment where the governmental narrative was committed to improving standards, but formal legislation lagged. Quantitative text analysis demonstrates that the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has re-emphasised consumer standards post-Grenfell. But the process of institutional formation has been punctuated by social, political and economic crises, and the power of the regulator to enforce improved standards has been limited by legislative delays.

Quantitative text analysis of language use in rare dementia support groups

AbstractBackgroundQuantitative text analysis facilitates study of internal states of speakers in an interspace between self‐report measures and qualitative analyses. The methodology is well‐established in psychological research, including in numerous support group settings.MethodIn this study, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) was employed to characterise conversations in online multi‐component (peers and professionals) support groups for familial caregivers of people living with young onset, atypical or inherited (rare) dementias. Using a corpus of transcripts (129,616 words) from 14 sessions, the differences between trained facilitators’ (n = 2) and participants’ (n = 14) speech were examined, and the impact of agenda on discussion was investigated. Sessions were semi‐structured, addressing independence and identity, or unstructured, without agenda. Statistical methods included comparison of linguistic features with natural speech, Poisson regression, and a clustering algorithm.ResultMeaningful differences between natural speech and the corpus emerged, including in emotional tone (Tone; d = ‐3.2, p&lt;0.001), level of analytic/informal language (Analytic; d = 0.8, p = 0.01), degree of expertise/confidence (Clout; d = 1.0, p = 0.002), and openness/guardedness (Authentic; d = ‐0.9, p = 0.006) (Figure 1). Differences were observed between facilitators and participants in the descriptive (Figure 1) and inferential (Figures 2&amp;3) statistical methods employed. Differences between unstructured and semi‐structured sessions, including between different agendas in the semi‐structured sessions, were observed. Sessions 2 and 4 focused on the participant while sessions 1 and 3 focused on their loved one (Figure 2). The clustering algorithm categorised participants’ conversational turns into three groups: sharing experience (EXP), self‐reflection (SELF), and group processes (GROUP). Contribution‐types were dispersed throughout sessions (Figure 3).ConclusionResults suggest that LIWC2015 can be used to distinguish support group conversations from natural speech, facilitators from participants, and different sessions based on agenda. The methodology could be adapted for use by other peer‐support services wanting insight into their groups using only session transcripts as raw data.

Comparative European legislative research in the age of large-scale computational text analysis: A review article

Advances in data accessibility and analytical methods opened new frontiers for comparative studies of European legislative activities. However, these advances still need to be fully harnessed by legislative scholars for multiple reasons. We provide an overview of extant research agendas to identify these reasons and explore the opportunities for tapping the potential of big data and quantitative text analysis. We present significant data collection efforts, such as ParlSpeech, the Comparative Agendas Project and CLARIN, and highlight their respective value for, primarily, large-N comparative research focusing on European Union member states and the European Union itself. Our review highlights the most consequential gaps in the literature and shortcomings of available data and analysis. These include the lack of extensive historical and geographical coverage, missing harmonisation and cross-linking between separate efforts, no unified speech and document (bill, law) databases, and the unavailability of good-quality full-text variables.

I Can’t See You; Can You Hear Me? Gender Norms and Context During In-Person and Teleconference U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments

AbstractFemale attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.

A quantitative textual analysis of the subjective effects of ayahuasca in naïve users with and without depression

Ayahuasca is a brew with psychoactive properties that has been used as an entheogen for centuries, with more recent studies suggesting it is a promising treatment for some clinical disorders. Although there is an emerging scientific literature on its effects, to the best of our knowledge no study has explored the self-reported experiences of first-time ayahuasca users with quantitative textual analysis tools. Accordingly, the current study aimed to analyze the subjective experience of naive individuals with depression and healthy controls after consuming ayahuasca. For this purpose, responses from a subsample of participants from a previous clinical trial to open-ended questions regarding their experience with ayahuasca underwent textual analysis. Data from nine patients with treatment-resistant depression and 20 healthy individuals were included, and quantitative textual analysis was performed using IRaMuTeQ 0.7 alpha 2 and R 3.1.2. The analysis identified five clusters: alterations in the state of consciousness, cognitive changes, somatic alterations, auditory experiences, and visual perceptual content. Additionally, findings suggest specific features of the experience of people with depression with ayahuasca, such as increased aversive bodily reactions. The results are consistent with previous findings indicating central axes of the psychedelic experience, and may inform therapeutic approaches using ayahuasca.

Academic texts reviewing as a productive training task

Introduction. The process of creation of academic texts by students is actively studied in the global higher education system in connection with the target of shaping students’ general research and learning activities. The aim of the paper is studying the specifics of students’ abstracting scientific texts, viewed as a productive learning task. Materials and methods. The study of the scientific texts abstracting process involved 125 second-year Bachelor degree students majoring in engineering and technical fields. The survey involved qualitative and quantitative content analysis of texts of abstracts. A fragment of students’ substantiation of applied relevance of a selected topic in the academic discipline “Fundamentals of Psychology” served as a unit of the analysis. Results. As shown by the analysis of the abstracts’ content, a total of 88% of students originally treated the abstracting task as a reproductive target, i.e. the abstract is treated as a text compiled from materials of educational, methodological and scientific literature. After refining the texts of abstracts, 76% of the students eventually reached the level of explicit personalised substantiation of practical application of the theoretical knowledge. Abstracting as a productive learning target contains novelty and variability of solutions; its fulfilment supposes the students’ effective substantiation of the applied significance of the explored subject. Under this condition, such components of the abstracting process as motivational, intellectual, operational, axiological and communicative ones are actualised. Conclusion. It is possible to distinguish two main strategies of teaching students to create scientific texts: 1) formation of specific skills, abilities and competences; 2) development of scientific worldview, academic literacy, methodological culture. In the authors’ opinion, every subject area, types of preparation work and academic classes have a potential for simultaneous realisation of the given positions. Further research should envisage perfection of the individual approach towards involvement of greater number of students in solving productive/creative learning targets.

Women Struggle for Workers' Rights in Radical and Moderate Feminist Media

Aims: This study sought to take a closer look at how a message and theme are presented by two online feminist alternative media considered to have distinct styles, namely Konde.co which is Radical and Magdalene.co which is Moderate, sincethe text in the news contains a powerful ability to influence the public’s views towards existing reality. &#x0D; Study Design: This study used quantitative text analysis.&#x0D; Place and Duration of Study: 35 articles that are relevant to the topic were taken as research material, with a publication period between April 1, 2019 –May 31, 2023. This period was chosen due to the nuance of Labor Day where many working women voiced their aspirations at that moment&#x0D; Methodology: Content analysis is an important research method in social sciences and human sciences. This method has two key advantages. First, it accepts symbolic communications, which are relatively unstructured, as data. It means that content analysis can accept data in the form of text, images, or other symbols, even if they lack clear formal structures.&#x0D; Results: Text in the news is very effective in shaping public perceptions of existing reality. In the context of news, text functions as a representation of communication. Through words, sentences and writing styles, text in news can shape how readers perceive and judge reality. In addition, text as a symbol has the ability to convey meaning that seeps into people's feelings or emotions. The massive scale of developments in information technology makes it easier for people to access text in the news. It is also utilized by certain groups to disseminate information using their media. As a result, media have grown healthily in Indonesia.&#x0D; Conclusion: It is clear from this study that Konde.co and Magdalene.co, among others, fill the role of alternative media in voicing women's issues, especially working women. Konde.co is aggressively voicing the issue of female workers using radical language and diction. Magdalene.co, on the other hand, is consistent in pushing the belief that women deserve the same stability and career path as men.

A European Public Sphere United by Football: A Comparative Quantitative Text Analysis of German, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish Football Media

AbstractThe ability of the European community to respond to the multiple crises threatening the European Union and Europe depends in part on citizens' shared European identity giving legitimacy and support to communal action. Men's elite European club football is an example of a cultural practice that is highly Europeanised, reaches diverse audiences and is a known carrier of collective identities. This article examines the emergence of a European public football sphere through the convergence of football coverage across national media spaces, serving as a foundation for European identity constructions. It connects the concept of a European public sphere to the Europeanisation and mediatisation of football and its potential effects on European identity formation. Results indicate a convergence of football coverage around high‐profile and high‐status aspects of European football, creating a strongly aligned, homogenous but exclusive European public football sphere that leaves many parts of Europe on the sidelines.

Mapping the conceptual system of an urban theory and its evolution: a text analysis of space syntax conference papers over 20 years

This work presents a new methodology for analysing the conceptual system of a scientific theory over time. Through the application of a quantitative text analysis to a large corpus of conference proceedings from 1997 to 2017, this study offers insight into the development and relationships of concepts within the domain of space syntax as a representative field within urban morphology. The evolution of this specific field is tracked for the first time with the aim of inspiring comparable analyses in other areas of urban morphology and urban studies.

Comparing qualitative and quantitative text analysis methods in combination with document-based social network analysis to understand policy networks

AbstractThe literature that reflects on the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in combination with other methods is flourishing. However, there is a dearth of studies that compare qualitative and quantitative methods to complement structural SNA. This article addresses this gap by systematically discussing the advantages and disadvantages relating to the use of qualitative text analysis and interviewing as well as quantitative text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as word frequency analysis, cluster analysis, topic modeling, and topic classification to understand policy networks. This method-oriented comparative study features two empirical studies that respectively examine the Employment Thematic Network, established under the aegis of the European Commission, and the intergovernmental cooperation network set up within the Bologna Process. The article compares and discusses the underlying research processes in terms of time, human resources, research resources, unobtrusiveness, and effectiveness toward the goal of telling meaningful stories about the examined networks in light of specific guiding hypotheses. In doing so, the paper nurtures the debate on mixed-methods research on social networks amidst the well-known paradigm war between qualitative and quantitative methods in network analysis.

The Question of Studying Information Entropy in Poetic Texts

One of the approaches to quantitative text analysis is to represent a given text in the form of a time series, which can be followed by an information entropy study for different text representations, such as “symbolic entropy”, “phonetic entropy” and “emotional entropy” of various orders. Studying authors’ styles based on such entropic characteristics of their works seems to be a promising area in the field of information analysis. In this work, the calculations of entropy values of the first, second and third order for the corpus of poems by A.S. Pushkin and other poets from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry were carried out. The values of “symbolic entropy”, “phonetic entropy” and “emotional entropy” and their mathematical expectations and variances were calculated for given corpora using the software application that automatically extracts statistical information, which is potentially applicable to tasks that identify features of the author’s style. The statistical data extracted could become the basis of the stylometric classification of authors by entropy characteristics.

Resisting right-wing populism in power: a comparative analysis of the Facebook activities of social movements in Italy and the UK

ABSTRACT This paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom. The research question is how social movements are implementing a process of reactive political identity construction – i.e. political identification – and a political counter-strategy by opposing right-wing populism in power through their Facebook official accounts. It implements a mixed-method research design with in-depth semi-structured interviews and a two-step quantitative text analysis based on Topic Model and Dictionary Method.

An evaluation of the flip flop approach to combating terrorism and religious extremism in Nigeria from 2015-2022

The fundamental responsibility of government is to secure citizens life and properties. The ongoing terrorist activities and religious extremism in Nigeria is yet to receive the required attention from the government. In light of the growing influence of terrorism and religious extremism in Nigeria, the study adopted the relative deprivation theory, to explain possible causes of terrorism and the recruitment of terrorists. The paper examines the ideological variations among the terrorist groups, using the quantitative textual analysis of secondary data to evaluate and scrutinize the flip flop approach of the Nigeria government from 2015 to 2022 in combating terrorism and religious extremism in the country. Despite the response by government, insecurity, terrorism and religious extremism have not been defeated due to lack of political will and the inability of government to make good laws to sanction offenders, thus, endemic poverty encourages the spread of terrorism and religious extremism. The study recommend among others, the need for government to properly police the borders, religious or tribal nepotism should not be condoled and not until systematic corruption, bad governance, inter religious and ethnic rivalry aimed at the control of state apparatus for economic and political selfish gains are seriously addressed and curtailed. The paper suggests that acute poverty and relative deprivation are precursor to the serial insecurity and terrorism that Nigeria is facing today.