Kristen Cibelli Hibben, Zachary Smith, Benjamin Rogers, Valerie Ryan, Paul Scanlon, Travis Hoppe
{"title":"Semi-Automated Nonresponse Detection for Open-Text Survey Data","authors":"Kristen Cibelli Hibben, Zachary Smith, Benjamin Rogers, Valerie Ryan, Paul Scanlon, Travis Hoppe","doi":"10.1177/08944393241249720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241249720","url":null,"abstract":"Open-ended survey questions can enable researchers to gain insights beyond more commonly used closed-ended question formats by allowing respondents an opportunity to provide information with few constraints and in their own words. Open-ended web probes are also increasingly used to inform the design and evaluation of survey questions. However, open-ended questions are more susceptible to insufficient or irrelevant responses that can be burdensome and time-consuming to identify and remove manually, often resulting in underuse of open-ended questions and, when used, potential inclusion of poor-quality data. To address these challenges, we developed and publicly released the Semi-Automated Nonresponse Detection for Survey text (SANDS), an item nonresponse detection approach based on a Bidirectional Transformer for Language Understanding model, fine-tuned using Simple Contrastive Sentence Embedding and targeted human coding, to categorize open-ended text data as valid or likely nonresponse. This approach is powerful in that it uses natural language processing as opposed to existing nonresponse detection approaches that have relied exclusively on rules or regular expressions or used bag-of-words approaches that tend to perform less well on short pieces of text, typos, or uncommon words, often prevalent in open-text survey data. This paper presents the development of SANDS and a quantitative evaluation of its performance and potential bias using open-text responses from a series of web probes as case studies. Overall, the SANDS model performed well in identifying a dataset of likely valid results to be used for quantitative or qualitative analysis, particularly on health-related data. Developed for generalizable use and accessible to others, the SANDS model can greatly improve the efficiency of identifying inadequate and irrelevant open-text responses, offering expanded opportunities for the use of open-text data to inform question design and improve survey data quality.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140910676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ke M. Huang-Isherwood, Jaeho Cho, Joo-Wha Hong, Eugene Lee
{"title":"Human or Not?: An Experiment With Chatbot Manipulations to Test Machine Heuristics and Political Self-Concepts","authors":"Ke M. Huang-Isherwood, Jaeho Cho, Joo-Wha Hong, Eugene Lee","doi":"10.1177/08944393241252027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241252027","url":null,"abstract":"Chatbots have a growing role to play in political discourse, including in political campaigns, voter mobilization ventures, and dissemination of political news, though chatbots in the political domain are relatively understudied. While testing the machine heuristics and political self-concepts frameworks, we carried out a 2 × 2 experiment where both perceived conversational partner (i.e., bot, human) and topic (i.e., political, casual) were manipulated ( N = 126). During the experiment, participants exchanged chat messages with trained research confederates for 30 min. In support of the machine heuristics and political self-concepts frameworks, participants assigned to human partners reported more positive relationships and higher political interest. Through moderation analysis, liking the partner was found to differ between the perceived partner conditions, with perceived political knowledge varying more in the human conditions. Thus, the experimental findings add nuance to interpersonal (i.e., impression management and social identity theory) and human-computer interaction theories (i.e., machine heuristics and Computers Are Social Actors), and have broader implications for online political interactions and for decisionmakers of online political discourse spaces.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Use and Abuse of Social Media as a Punitive Remedy in Light of Criminal Law: A Tool or a Court? Analysis of the Chilean Regulation","authors":"Alejandra Castillo Ara","doi":"10.1177/08944393241252639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241252639","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last few years, Chile’s judicial system has witnessed a rise in criminal assumptions generated through social networks, under its hypotheses of funas, doxing, flagging or, in general, the exposure of the personal data of an individual, whether motivated by the performance of conduct of criminal relevance or simply of dubious morality or social appropriateness. Although these conducts originated as a form of digital social empowerment, they have turned into a criminal matter on their own right, posing a series of issues regarding the correct application of the law and casting doubt on the appropriate legal mechanisms to handle these types of accusations, as cases involving these kinds of conducts have been resolved both on a criminal and constitutional level. Thus, the purpose of this article is to determine whether the current Chilean national regulation provides sufficient tools that, with a reasonable interpretation, allow it to correctly handle these sorts of cases. Moreover, this article aims to, through a comprehensive analysis of Germany’s current legislation, determine whether Chile requires a new all-encompassing regulatory approach to these hypotheses similar to the German solution, or if the current rules provide a proper solution to the problem of public personal data exposure on social media as a dangerous behaviour for the person whose data is being exposed.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"88 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Online and Unkind: Examining the Personality Correlates of Online Political Incivility","authors":"Luke Ryan Mungall, Scott Pruysers, Julie Blais","doi":"10.1177/08944393241249725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241249725","url":null,"abstract":"Many forms of online political incivility threaten democratic norms, contribute to polarization, and are often directed at women and racial minorities. Recent research shows that online political incivility may come from a minority of users that are just as hostile offline as they are online, meaning that individual differences in personality traits may be an important predictor of online political incivility. Drawing upon a large sample of adults living in Canada (N = 1725), we examined the association between personality traits and online political incivility using robust measures of psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and the general traits of the HEXACO. While controlling for a variety of sociodemographic and political variables, we found that people who score higher in honesty-humility, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, as well as the planfulness facet of Machiavellianism, are less likely to report engagement in online political incivility. People who score higher in extraversion, several facets of psychopathy, grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and antagonistic Machiavellianism, by contrast, are more likely to report engagement in online political incivility. In general, the personality traits that predict offline aggression and antisocial behaviour tend to be the same traits that predict self-reports of vulgarity, stereotyping, and threats in online political discussions. Interventions to reduce online incivility may benefit from considering the dispositional tendencies of uncivil users.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140819987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rens Vliegenthart, Jade Vrielink, Katharine Dommett, Rachel Gibson, Esmeralda Bon, Xiaotong Chu, Claes de Vreese, Sophie Lecheler, Jörg Matthes, Sophie Minihold, Lukas Otto, Marlis Stubenvoll, Sanne Kruikemeier
{"title":"Citizens’ Acceptance of Data-Driven Political Campaigning: A 25-Country Cross-National Vignette Study","authors":"Rens Vliegenthart, Jade Vrielink, Katharine Dommett, Rachel Gibson, Esmeralda Bon, Xiaotong Chu, Claes de Vreese, Sophie Lecheler, Jörg Matthes, Sophie Minihold, Lukas Otto, Marlis Stubenvoll, Sanne Kruikemeier","doi":"10.1177/08944393241249708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241249708","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how the acceptance of data-driven political campaigning depends on four different message characteristics. A vignette study was conducted in 25 countries with a total of 14,390 respondents who all evaluated multiple descriptions of political advertisements. Relying on multi-level models, we find that in particular the source and the issue of the message matters. Messages that are sent by a party the respondent likes and deal with a political issue the respondent considers important are rated more acceptable. Furthermore, targeting based on general characteristics instead of individual ones is considered more acceptable, as is a general call to participate in the upcoming elections instead of a specific call to vote for a certain party. Effects differ across regulatory contexts, with the negative impact of both individual targeting and a specific call to vote for a certain party being in countries that have higher levels of legislative regulation.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140819997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documenting and Exchanging Simulation Specifications: A Language-Agnostic Approach","authors":"Alan G. Isaac","doi":"10.1177/08944393241246280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241246280","url":null,"abstract":"Simulation experiments have increased their influence on social science, creating a need for documentation tools and practices that facilitate replicability. Two crucial components common to many simulation experiments require particularly detailed documentation: the baseline parameterization, and the experimental designs. This paper explores the adaptability to these needs of a recent but already popular file format. It demonstrates how to produce easily human-readable documentation of baseline parameterizations that also supports automated, programming-language agnostic information exchange. This format is additionally useful for documenting certain experimental designs.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140820035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jessica Daikeler, Leon Fröhling, Indira Sen, Lukas Birkenmaier, Tobias Gummer, Jan Schwalbach, Henning Silber, Bernd Weiß, Katrin Weller, Clemens Lechner
{"title":"Assessing Data Quality in the Age of Digital Social Research: A Systematic Review","authors":"Jessica Daikeler, Leon Fröhling, Indira Sen, Lukas Birkenmaier, Tobias Gummer, Jan Schwalbach, Henning Silber, Bernd Weiß, Katrin Weller, Clemens Lechner","doi":"10.1177/08944393241245395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241245395","url":null,"abstract":"While survey data has long been the focus of quantitative social science analyses, observational and content data, although long-established, are gaining renewed attention; especially when this type of data is obtained by and for observing digital content and behavior. Today, digital technologies allow social scientists to track “everyday behavior” and to extract opinions from public discussions on online platforms. These new types of digital traces of human behavior, together with computational methods for analyzing them, have opened new avenues for analyzing, understanding, and addressing social science research questions. However, even the most innovative and extensive amounts of data are hollow if they are not of high quality. But what does data quality mean for modern social science data? To investigate this rather abstract question the present study focuses on four objectives. First, we provide researchers with a decision tree to identify appropriate data quality frameworks for a given use case. Second, we determine which data types and quality dimensions are already addressed in the existing frameworks. Third, we identify gaps with respect to different data types and data quality dimensions within the existing frameworks which need to be filled. And fourth, we provide a detailed literature overview for the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives on data quality. By conducting a systematic literature review based on text mining methods, we identified and reviewed 58 data quality frameworks. In our decision tree, the three categories, namely, data type, the perspective it takes, and its level of granularity, help researchers to find appropriate data quality frameworks. We, furthermore, discovered gaps in the available frameworks with respect to visual and especially linked data and point out in our review that even famous frameworks might miss important aspects. The article ends with a critical discussion of the current state of the literature and potential future research avenues.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"2016 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140808512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Serious Games, Knowledge Acquisition, and Conflict Resolution: The Case of PeaceMaker as a Peace Education Tool","authors":"Iolie Nicolaidou, Ronit Kampf","doi":"10.1177/08944393241249724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241249724","url":null,"abstract":"Israeli-Jews and Palestinians cannot easily be exposed to contradicting information about “the other” in the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the emotionally charged situation and prevailing ethnocentrism. Serious games like PeaceMaker are used as innovative interventions for peace education. Winning PeaceMaker indicates better conflict resolution skills and developing an informative viewpoint regarding the situation, which is required for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. The evaluation of the effectiveness of prosocial games in educating about conflict and peace in the literature is severely lacking. We examine the effects of this computerized simulation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on enhancing knowledge about the conflict and “the other” among undergraduate players who are direct parties (i.e., Israeli-Jews and Palestinians) and third parties (i.e., Americans and Cypriots). In addition, we investigate the knowledge gap between direct parties and third parties who won and did not win the game. Using questionnaires, we conducted a quasi-experimental study with 168 undergraduates using a pre- and post-intervention research design. We found that direct parties to the conflict acquired significantly more knowledge about the other side, and third parties acquired significantly more knowledge about the conflict after playing PeaceMaker. In addition, PeaceMaker minimized the knowledge gap after playing the game among direct parties who won the game and those who did not win and increased the knowledge gap between third parties who won the game and those who did not win. Our results suggest that serious games might be effective interventions for peace education, because they appear to enhance knowledge about the conflict, and about “the other” particularly for young people who are direct parties to this divide.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140808520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Franziska M. Leipold, Pascal J. Kieslich, Felix Henninger, Amanda Fernández-Fontelo, Sonja Greven, Frauke Kreuter
{"title":"Detecting Respondent Burden in Online Surveys: How Different Sources of Question Difficulty Influence Cursor Movements","authors":"Franziska M. Leipold, Pascal J. Kieslich, Felix Henninger, Amanda Fernández-Fontelo, Sonja Greven, Frauke Kreuter","doi":"10.1177/08944393241247425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241247425","url":null,"abstract":"Online surveys are a widely used mode of data collection. However, as no interviewer is present, respondents face any difficulties they encounter alone, which may lead to measurement error and biased or (at worst) invalid conclusions. Detecting response difficulty is therefore vital. Previous research has predominantly focused on response times to detect general response difficulty. However, response difficulty may stem from different sources, such as overly complex wording or similarity between response options. So far, the question of whether indicators can discriminate between these sources has not been addressed. The goal of the present study, therefore, was to evaluate whether specific characteristics of participants’ cursor movements are related to specific properties of survey questions that increase response difficulty. In a preregistered online experiment, we manipulated the length of the question text, the complexity of the question wording, and the difficulty of the response options orthogonally between questions. We hypothesized that these changes would lead to increased response times, hovers (movement pauses), and y-flips (changes in vertical movement direction), respectively. As expected, each manipulation led to an increase in the corresponding measure, although the other dependent variables were affected as well. However, the strengths of the effects did differ as expected between the mouse-tracking indices: Hovers were more sensitive to complex wording than to question difficulty, while the opposite was true for y-flips. These results indicate that differentiating sources of response difficulty might indeed be feasible using mouse-tracking.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"151 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140651841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Covering the Campaign: Computational Tools for Measuring Differences in Candidate and Party News Coverage With Application to an Emerging Democracy","authors":"Aaron Erlich, Danielle F. Jung, James D. Long","doi":"10.1177/08944393241247420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241247420","url":null,"abstract":"How does media coverage of electoral campaigns distinguish parties and candidates in emerging democracies? To answer, we present a multi-step procedure that we apply in South Africa. First, we develop a theoretically informed classification of election coverage as either “narrow” or “broad” from within the entire corpus of news coverage during an electoral campaign. Second, to deploy our classification scheme, we use a supervised machine learning approach to classify news as “broad,” “narrow,” or “not election-related.” Finally, we combine our supervised classification with a topic modeling algorithm (BERTTopic) that is based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), in addition to other statistical and machine learning methods. The combination of our classification scheme, BERTTopic, and associated methods allows us to identify the main election-related themes among broad and narrow election-related coverage, and how different candidates and parties are associated with these themes. We provide an in-depth discussion of our method for interested users in the social sciences. We then apply our proposed techniques on text from nearly 100,000 news articles during South Africa’s 2014 campaign and test our empirical predictions about candidate and party coverage of corruption, the economy, health, public infrastructure, and security. The application of our method highlights a nuanced campaign environment in South Africa; candidates and parties frequently receive distinct and substantive coverage on key campaign themes.","PeriodicalId":49509,"journal":{"name":"Social Science Computer Review","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140622915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}