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Other Psychology

Cynthia L. S. Pury

2011

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Automation Can Lead To Confounds In Text Analysis: Back, Küfner, And Egloff (2010) And The Not-So-Angry Americans, Cynthia L. S. Pury Jun 2011

Automation Can Lead To Confounds In Text Analysis: Back, Küfner, And Egloff (2010) And The Not-So-Angry Americans, Cynthia L. S. Pury

Cynthia L. S. Pury

Automated text analysis facilitates research using large archival data sets but can be confounded by automatically generated repeating entries. Back, Kufner, and Egloff (2010) used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) to analyze pager messages sent to more than 85,000 American pagers on September 11, 2001. They found that anger, as indexed by the words contained in those messages, rose steadily throughout the day.

The data contained many technical codes; thus, Back et al. counted only words recognized by LIWC. However, this procedure did not exclude automatically generated messages. Consequently, LIWC words in such messages …