I am very pleased to announce that Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Dustin Tingley, Christopher Lucas, Jetson Leder-Luis, Shana Gadarian, Bethany Albertson, and David Rand are the 2014 winners of the Society for Political Methodology's Harold F. Gosnell Prize for the best work in political methodology presented at any political science conference during the preceding year. Their "Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses with Applications to Experiments" was presented at a number of conferences over the past year including the NYU Experimental Methods conference, Visions in Methodology, and the New Directions in Text Analysis Conference in London.
Please join me in congratulating them on this prestigious honor.
The citation from the award committee (Jake Bowers (chair), Adam Glynn, Xun Pang) is the following:
Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Dustin Tingley, Christopher Lucas, Jetson Leder-Luis, Shana Gadarian, Bethany Albertson, and David Rand's "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" advances political methodology with a novel Bayesian measurement model for text analysis, by enhancing the utility of open-ended survey responses and by connecting text analysis and topic modeling to causal inference for survey experiments. What is the causal effect of a change in survey frame on the topics mentioned in open-ended responses to questions? The model and model evaluation and checking methods proposed here enable researchers to answer such questions within a fully Bayesian framework. They engage with the problem of naming topics by reporting exemplar documents for given topics and by proposing a measure of semantic interpretability --- both of which allow a scholar to double-check intuitions about what a given topic represents. They show that this approach closely approximates human coding and thus opens new opportunities for innovations in research design in political science. Finally, by simultaneously addressing the literatures on text analysis, causal inference, and survey research, this paper promotes communication between a diverse set of methodological communities.
Please join me in thanking the award committee as well as the many individuals who submitted nominations for this award.
KQ
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Kevin Quinn
Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
490 Simon #7200
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
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President
The Society for Political Methodology
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