Regional subjective well‐being through a media sentiment index: Case of the Drâa‐Tafilalet oasis region in Morocco

Abstract

This article estimates the subjective well‐being of the oasis, peripheral and border region of Drâa‐Tafilalet in Morocco through sentiment analysis of its media coverage. We extracted nearly 174,000 articles published between October 1991 and September 2020 from the website of a Moroccan newspaper with a large circulation and detected those covering the region in question. Then, after the preprocessing phase, we analysed the textual data of these articles by determining the sentimental polarity of the words used to build a monthly subjective well‐being indicator for the Drâa‐Tafilalet region. Thus, we identified nine early warnings of local subjective well‐being malaise that were triggered between October 1992 and September 2020.