What is in a word? Text Mining and Positive Psychology
Method Stream: Text Mining
ECs: Only 14 EC (standard, no new/own data collection. Applicable in case of a clinical internship)
Description:
Positive Psychology has mostly relied on the development of reliable and valid measurement instruments to assess concepts like compassion, hope, gratitude or well-being. Yet, people may express these concepts also in stories about their everyday lives. Text mining algorithms have made use of dictionary approaches to study psychological concepts. For example, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count counts psychological words like positive and negative emotions or particular themes like relationships or work. There is to date, not a dictionary for positive psychological words. In this assignment, you are going to contribute to such a dictionary. You may focus broadly on positive psychological concepts or choose a particular concept to investigate. You start with existing definitions, questionnaires, and probably articles or intervention manuals to identify specific positive psychological words. You then validate the dictionary using existing data (research data, intervention data or social media data).
Who are we looking for?
We are looking for a student who has a feel for systematic analyses, but also for nuances in what people tell
What do we offer?
We will support you in defining your own research question and finding data to answer the question.