Measuring Social Change Using Text Data: A Simple Distributional Approach

Takashi Kamihigashi, Kazuhiro Seki and Masahiko Shibamoto
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Kazuhiro Seki: Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics, Konan University, Japan, and Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration (RIEB), Kobe University, Japan

No DP2017-16, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple approach to measuring social change using text data. The approach is based on the idea that any significant change in a society should affect the distribution of the words used in the society. Essentially we use the total variation distance between the distributions of words in adjacent months as a measure of social change during the latter month. Based on text data from the Nikkei Newspaper from 1989 to 2015, the largest social change observed in Japan during this period took place in March 2011, the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2017-16, Revised 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
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https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2017-16.pdf Revised version, 2017 (application/pdf)

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