title:         A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Texts
authors:       Lanny Martin, Georg Vanberg
entrydate:     2006-04-25 18:12:28
keywords:      content analysis, wordscores
abstract:      In a recent article in the American Political Science Review, Laver, Benoit, and Garry propose a new method for conducting content analysis. Their Wordscores approach, by automating text coding procedures, represents a fundamental advance in content analysis and will potentially have a large long-term impact on research across the discipline.  In this research note, we contend that the usefulness of this procedure is unfortunately limited by the fact that the transformation procedure used by the authors (which is meant to allow for the substantive interpretation of results) has two significant shortcomings.  Specifically, it distorts the metric on which content scores are placed—hindering the ability of scholars to make meaningful comparisons across texts—and it is very sensitive to the texts that are scored—opening up the possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertently or not, results that depend on the texts they choose to include in their analyses.  We propose (and have written program code to implement) a transformation procedure that solves these problems.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=592

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