Empirical Social Science Research Seminar Series
15 May 2024
University of Mannheim
👋 Camille Landesvatter
📍 Research Associate at the MZES, University of Mannheim
🏫 Studied social sciences and sociology at the University of Stuttgart and Mannheim
🎓 Started my PhD in Sociology in 2020 under the supervision of Florian Keusch and Paul Bauer (TrustME project)
🏠 Moved to Berlin in 2021 and visited the WZB for a research stay
Finished my PhD last month! 🎉
Audio Data in the Social Sciences and in Surveys
Audio Data in the Social Sciences and in Surveys
Cognitive Processing Modes:
Audio Data in the Social Sciences and in Surveys
Explanations:
Gavras et al. 2022: Audio formats facilitate the answer process by enabling open narration, intuitive and spontaneous answers (≠ intentional and conscious text answers).
Revilla et al. 2020: Speaking requires less effort than typing and voice formats make survey answering easier and quicker.
Audio Data in the Social Sciences and in Surveys
Increasing number of methods to analyze audio data
Intersection of Computer Science, Computational Linguistics and Computational Social Science
Examples of Methods:
Automatic Speech Recognition (“speech-to-text”)
Natural Language Processing
Speaker Diarization / Speaker Identification
Environmental Sound Analysis
Speech Emotion Recognition
Emotion Analysis
Emotion Analysis
The concept of emotions is not always clearly distinguished from similar phenomena such as mood, affect, and feeling. (Gabriel et al. 2023, 39)
Sentiment: the valence of a feeling (e.g., positive versus negative)
Emotions: a more complex and multi-dimensional state of feeling further characterized by their intensity as well as their cognitive evaluations (e.g., other-person control for anger)
Affect = “an umbrella term that is used to refer to both emotions and moods” (Lee, Dirks, and Campagna 2023, 549)
Emotions in Political Trust
“A decision to trust a government organization may […] not always be conscious and/or rational.” (Grimmelikhuijsen 2012, 57)
Emotions in Political Trust
What thought processes and associations come to respondents’ minds when prompted to discuss ‘politics’ and their level of trust?
Are individual trust judgments in surveys driven by affective components?
Motivation:
Research on determinants of political trust generates knowledge on how trust evolves and changes over time.
The influence of emotions on political trust is crucial in order to understand how the media such as television uses emotions as an instrument for influencing people, for example by showing politicians’s emotional appearances in the media (Gabriel et al. 2023)
Emotions in Political Trust
Political Trust Question | “How often can you trust the federal government in Washington to do what is right?” | closed-ended, 4 categories (Always; Most of the time; About half of the time; Never; Don’t Know |
Probing Question |
“The previous question was: ‘How often can you trust the federal government in Washington to do what is right?’. Your answer was: ‘About half of the time’. In your own words, please explain why you selected this answer.” |
open-ended, audio request, SVoice tool (Höhne, Gavras and Qureshi 2021) |
Emotions in Political Trust
Self-administered web survey, September 6 to October 27, 2023
U.S. non-probability sample; \(n\)=1,474 with 491 audio open answers
quota-based (U.S. Census Bureau 2015) with challenges in obtaining sufficient participants in the oldest age category (58+)
Emotions in Political Trust
Emotions in Political Trust
Emotions in Political Trust
Emotions in Political Trust
Emotions in Political Trust
Emotions in Political Trust
We find that individual’s associations, thought processes and feelings influence how much they report to have trust in politics.
But we find few respondents to use emotional language in their answers and there is no consistent effect of emotions on reported trust score.
Two follow-up questions:
Outlook
Overall, audio data plays a crucial role for studying societies, as spoken language is one of humanity’s most important means of communication, expression and information exchange in various fields (e.g., public speeches and debates, political talk shows and podcasts, press conferences).
→ We need more applied research to gain more experiences with this type of data.
Outlook
Gabriel, Maier, Masch, and Renner. 2023. Political Leaders, the Display of Emotions, and the Public: An Empirical Study on the Coverage and Effects of Emotions in German Politics. Nomos.
Gavras, Höhne, Blom, and Schoen. 2022. “Innovating the collection of open-ended answers: The linguistic and content characteristics of written and oral answers to political attitude questions.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, 185(3):872-890.
Grimmelikhuijsen, Stephan. 2012. “Linking Transparency, Knowledge and Citizen Trust in Government: An Experiment.” International Review of Administrative Sciences 78(1):50–73.
Höhne and Gavras. 2022. “Typing or Speaking? Comparing Text and Voice Answers to Open Questions on Sensitive Topics in Smartphone Surveys.” Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4239015 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4239015.
Lee, Kurt, and Rachel L. Campagna. 2023. “At the Heart of Trust: Understanding the Integral Relationship Between Emotion and Trust.” Group & Organization Management 48(2):546–80.
Lodge, Milton, and Charles S. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge University Press.
Lütters, Friedrich-Freksa, and Egger. 2018.“Effects of Speech Assistance in Online Questionnaires.” Presented at the General Online Research Conference, Vol. 18.
Ravanelli, Parcollet, Plantinga, et al. 2021. “SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit.” arXiv.
Revilla, Couper, Bosch, and Asensio. 2020. “Testing the Use of Voice Input in a Smartphone Web Survey.” Social Science Computer Review 38(2):207–24.
Theiss-Morse and Dona-Gene Barton. 2017. “Emotion, Cognition, and Political Trust.” Pp. 160–75 in Handbook on Political Trust. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Camille Landesvatter — Analyzing Audio Survey Responses