POLS 256: Seminar in Public Opinion and Text Analysis
This course develops and builds upon theories of public opinion, primarily in the context of American politics. We will review some of the foundational texts in public opinion and how it is typically measured. Recognizing the rise of new and big data, we turn to content analysis and automated textual methods as a way of measuring public opinion. This is a completely new area in political science research, so the latter portion of the course focuses mostly on methods of textual analysis with the goal of measuring hard to measure concepts unavailable to survey researchers.
| Syllabus |
Readings
| Feinerer (2011) |
| Grimmer & Stewart (2012) |
| Quinn et al (2010) |
| Stewart (2010) |
| Feinerer Hornik Meyer (2008) |
| Grun and Hornik (2011) |
| Jurka et al (2012) |
| Converse (1964) |
Code
| Week 1 R Code |
| Week 3 R Code |
| Week 4 R Code |
| Week 5 R Code |
| Week 6 R Code |
| R Bug fixes |
| Week 7 R Code |
| Week 9 R Code |