Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T00:35:58.599Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Alternative Measures of the Media Policy Signal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2022

Stuart N. Soroka
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Christopher Wlezien
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Get access

Summary

Chapter 3 laid out the building blocks for our measures of the media policy signal and presented a preliminary version of that signal across newspapers, television, and social media content. We now turn to a series of refinements and robustness tests, critical checks on the accuracy of our media policy signal measures. We begin with some comparisons between crowdsourced codes and those produced by trained student coders. Assessing the accuracy of crowdsourced data is important for the dictionary-based measures in the preceding chapter and for the comparisons with machine-learning-based measures introduced in this chapter. We then turn to crowdsourced content analyses of the degree to which extracted content reflects past, present, or future changes in spending. Our measures likely reflect some combination of these spending changes, and understanding the balance of each will be important for analyses in subsequent chapters. Finally, we present comparisons of dictionary-based measures and those based on machine-learning, using nearly 30,000 human-coded sentences and random forest models to replicate that coding across our entire corpus.

Type
Chapter
Information
Information and Democracy
Public Policy in the News
, pp. 62 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×