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Automated text analysis in psychology: methods, applications, and future developments*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2014

RUMEN ILIEV*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
MORTEZA DEHGHANI
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
EYAL SAGI
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Recent years have seen rapid developments in automated text analysis methods focused on measuring psychological and demographic properties. While this development has mainly been driven by computer scientists and computational linguists, such methods can be of great value for social scientists in general, and for psychologists in particular. In this paper, we review some of the most popular approaches to automated text analysis from the perspective of social scientists, and give examples of their applications in different theoretical domains. After describing some of the pros and cons of these methods, we speculate about future methodological developments, and how they might change social sciences. We conclude that, despite the fact that current methods have many disadvantages and pitfalls compared to more traditional methods of data collection, the constant increase of computational power and the wide availability of textual data will inevitably make automated text analysis a common tool for psychologists.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research has been supported in part by an AFOSR Young Investigator award to MD, and ARTIS research grant to RI. We are thankful to Jeremy Ginges, Sid Horton, Antonio Damasio, Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel, Kate Johnson, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, Jesse Graham, Peter Khooshabeh, Peter Carnevale, and Derek Harmon for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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