Michael, Coding political characteristics is a common task in the field of political communication. There are no broadly established metrics as far as I am aware, but here are a few recent references: * Freelon, D. G. (2010). Analyzing online political discussion using three models of democratic communication. New Media & Society, 12(7), 1172-1190. * Janssen, D., & Kies, R. (2005). Online forums and deliberative democracy. Acta Politica, 40(3), 317-335. * Kelly, J., Fisher, D., & Smith, M. (2005). Debate, division, and diversity: Political discourse networks in USENET newsgroups. Online Deliberation 2005/DIAC-2005. * Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 6(2), 259-283. * Stromer-Galley, J. (2007). Measuring deliberation's content: A coding scheme. Journal of Public Deliberation, 3(1), 1-37. When coding your texts, you will want to follow standard content analysis practices, one of which is the assessment of intercoder reliability. In this you may find my online intercoder reliability application ReCal of some value: http://dfreelon.org/utils/recalfront/ . It calculates not only percent agreement but also chance-corrected reliability coefficients such as Scott's pi, Cohen's kappa, and Krippendorff's alpha. Hope some of this helps, ~DEEN On 11/22/10 10:36 AM, Michael Conover wrote:
Our research group (made up of physicists and computer scientists) needs to evaluate the political content of short pieces of text. To this end we've constructed a rubric for classification, ranging from strong left, lean left, and neutral, to lean right, strong right, and unclassifiable. While the criteria of the rubric are rather clear cut (a 'strong' classified sentence would contain attacks on a person or group's character, hyperbolic language, or intense / fanatical expressions of support for an issue), we all suspect that this is a solved problem.
I've heard this referred to by political scientists as 'coding' text, and it definitely falls within the domain of qualitative content analysis, but I'm yet to find anything specifically on evaluating political text. This in mind, can anyone point me towards an established metric for evaluating the political content of bodies of text?
Thanks kindly, Michael Conover _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Deen Freelon Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Communication University of Washington dfreelon@uw.edu http://dfreelon.org/