scholarly journals POLITICAL DISCOURSE CONTENT ANALYSIS: A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF A COMPUTERIZED TEXT ANALYSIS PROGRAM LINGUISTIC INQUIRY AND WORD COUNT (LIWC)

Author(s):  
Angelika Yanovets ◽  
Oksana Smal

The article examines and analyzes the linguistic and psychological features of political discourse using a computer-based Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) content analysis program to explore the relationship between political discourse and the personality of politicians. As for political discourse, it is perhaps the communicator, the linguistic personality, who plays the most important role in the communication. The linguistic personality of a politician is of particular interest in political discourse content-analysis, since it has the greatest influence on the public consciousness via mass media. Using text as a source of psychological and cognitive information has been gaining popularity. Researchers use a variety of methods to analyze texts, but Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) has proved to be the most common technique. The analysis of linguistic patterns of political discourse shows that in the context of political speech events such as media interviews, politicians make a unique choice of lexical units, which can be interpreted as a manifestation of certain personality traits. However, despite the significance of the results, there are clear limitations to the use of computerized methodologies to make political discourse content-analysis, such as the limited interpretive capacity of software to understand pragmatic and contextual use of lexical units.

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 336-343
Author(s):  
Katherine Guttmann ◽  
John Flibotte ◽  
Sara B. DeMauro ◽  
Holli Seitz

This study aimed to evaluate how parents of former neonatal intensive care unit patients with cerebral palsy perceive prognostic discussions following neuroimaging. Parent members of a cerebral palsy support network described memories of prognostic discussions after neuroimaging in the neonatal intensive care unit. We analyzed responses using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, manual content analysis, and thematic analysis. In 2015, a total of 463 parents met eligibility criteria and 266 provided free-text responses. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis showed that responses following neuroimaging contained negative emotion. The most common components identified through the content analysis included outcome, uncertainty, hope/hopelessness, and weakness in communication. Thematic analysis revealed 3 themes: (1) Information, (2) Communication, and (3) Impact. Parents of children with cerebral palsy report weakness in communication relating to prognosis, which persists in parents’ memories. Prospective work to develop interventions to improve communication between parents and providers in the neonatal intensive care unit is necessary.


2020 ◽  
pp. 0261927X2096564
Author(s):  
Kate G. Blackburn ◽  
Weixi Wang ◽  
Rhea Pedler ◽  
Rachel Thompson ◽  
Diana Gonzales

This study analyzed thousands of women’s online conversations in relation to their miscarriage or abortion experiences, classified as unplanned and planned traumas, respectively. Linguistic Inquiry Word Count text analysis revealed that people experiencing a planned trauma use distancing language patterns in higher frequency and engage in emotion regulation more than those who experienced trauma unexpectedly. On the other hand, planned trauma conversations used more self-focused language and more social-based language. Implications and future directions for trauma research are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonita Lee ◽  
Annisa Fitria ◽  
Henndy Ginting

The use of English in educational settings has become quite common in order to achieve global competitiveness. Given this fact, students are required to be fluent both in oral and written English. Unfortunately, the significant discrepancy is often found between the two. Students seemed to struggle when asked to elaborate their ideas in writing. With that in mind, this study would elaborate on the linguistic properties of students’ writings in order to understand the linguistic processes affecting such a discrepancy. Writings from a total of 205-business students were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC2015) focusing on the linguistic and grammatical properties such as word counts, tenses associated words, adjectives, adverbs and so on. We found that our samples’ writing profile was significantly different from those of LIWC2015, especially in properties such word counts, six-letter words, verb and adjectives, as well as the use of I-related pronoun. For example, we found that our sample used a lot more difficult words while wrote less than half of the global population, suggesting their ability as well as unwillingness to write at the same time. With this main finding, we concluded that students come short in terms of critical literacy. In addition to that, we would also discuss the potential psychological implications (narcissistic tendency) as well as the differences between men and women styles in writing.


Author(s):  
Sanaz Aghazadeh ◽  
Kris Hoang ◽  
Bradley Pomeroy

This paper provides methodological guidance for judgment and decision-making (JDM) researchers in accounting who are interested in using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program to analyze research participants’ written responses to open-ended questions. We discuss how LIWC’s measures of psychological constructs were developed and validated in psycholinguistic research. We then use data from an audit JDM study to illustrate the use of LIWC to guide researchers in identifying suitable measures, performing quality control procedures, and reporting the analysis. We also discuss research design considerations that will strengthen the inferences drawn from LIWC analysis. The paper concludes with examples where LIWC analysis has the potential to reveal participants’ deep, complex, effortful psychological processing and affective states from their written responses.


2006 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang H. Lee ◽  
Jongmin Park ◽  
Young Seok Seo

A language analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), was successful in identifying various psychological variables. This study investigated the relationship between spoken language and age inferred from drama scripts of 162 characters, analyzed by the Korean-LIWC across 4 age categories (10–19, 20–39, 40–59, and 60–79 years). Analysis indicated that younger characters use fewer phrases, morphemes, nouns, auxiliary words, and adverbs than older characters, suggesting less cognitive development of younger characters. In addition, younger characters used less positive words for emotion and achievement than older characters. These data appear contrary to the negative stereotypes of aging people.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur C. Graesser ◽  
Nia Dowell ◽  
Christian Moldovan

Everyone agrees that a computer could never understand and appreciate literature, but the fields of computational linguistics and discourse processing have made important advances in automatic detection of language and discourse characteristics. We have analyzed literary texts and political speeches with two computer tools, namely Coh-Metrix and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC). Coh-Metrix provides hundreds of measures that funnel into 5 principal components: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, deep cohesion, and narrativity. LIWC classifies words on 80 categories, such as first person pronouns, negative emotions, and social words. This paper illustrates how computer tools can unveil new insights about literature and can empirically test claims by literary scholars and social scientists. Our approach offers a computational science of literature.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Boot

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis program developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues. At the basis of LIWC is a dictionary that assigns words to categories. This dictionary is specific to English. Researchers who want to use LIWC on non-English texts have typically relied on translations of the dictionary into the language of the texts. Dictionary translation, however, is a labour-intensive procedure. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach: to use Machine Translation (MT) to translate the texts that must be analysed into English, and then use the English dictionary to analyse the texts. We test several LIWC versions, languages and MT engines, and consistently find the machine-translated text approach performs better than the translated-dictionary approach. We argue that for languages for which effective MT technology is available, there is no need to create new LIWC dictionary translations.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony M Evans ◽  
Olga Stavrova ◽  
Hannes Rosenbusch

How do expressions of doubt affect trust in online reviews? Previous research leads to conflicting predictions: some studies find that people trust confident advisors more than doubtful advisors, whereas others find doubtful advisors are trusted more, especially when advisors have salient conflicts-of-interest. We tested the effects of doubt in the Yelp Open Dataset (N = 5.9 million user reviews). Reviews were coded using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software, which contains two dictionaries related to doubt, tentativeness and (lack of) certainty. Doubtful reviews were more likely to be seen as useful, and this result was robust when controlling for other psychological variables, as well as review length and linguistic complexity. The beneficial consequences of expressing doubt were strongest for positive (5-star) reviews, suggesting that doubt may mitigate concerns about the veracity of overly positive reviews. The present study emphasizes the advantages of expressing doubt.


Author(s):  
Denis S. Mukhortov ◽  
Elizaveta A. Zhovner

Political discourse as a specific sign system in which the meaning depends on the speaker’s intention tends to portray participants in terms of “us” versus “them”, which makes “us-versus-them” polarization one of the main distinguishing features of political discourse. The onset of the 21st century is a turning point in the history of geopolitics, which requires politicians to be more creative in search of vote-winning means. The pragmasemantic approach allows to study presidential debates between 1. Bush and Al Gore from the standpoint of semantics which studies meaning and which has been recently affected by pragmatics that deals with non-linguistic aspects of meaning such as the context of a situation and the speaker’s intention. The presidential debates of 2000 are a vivid illustration of how two opposing politicians strive to share the same objective though different language means. The contentanalysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) was used in order to verify the results of research. The analysis of Pronouns, Positive/Negative Emotions, and Tense Focus through LIWC makes a contribution to political discourse studies. This article illustrate how various language means such as use of pronouns “we” and “they”, specific vocabulary and slogans, when grouped together, can appear to be an efficient research tactic.


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