Q&A: What works and what doesn’t when studying social media data
Ever since Friendster and Myspace gained popularity in the early 2000s, social scientists have been interested in studying the impact of…
A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center.
For our latest research findings, visit pewresearch.org.
All Decoded publications
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Using supervised machine learning to quantify political rhetoric
Several posts on this blog have examined unsupervised methods of natural language processing. These algorithms and models can help…
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Validating 2016 voters in Pew Research Center’s survey data
(Related post: Validating 2020 voters in Pew Research Center’s survey data)
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Making sense of topic models
Topic models can produce clusters of words that characterize written documents. But how do we figure out what those clusters mean, exactly?
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An intro to topic models for text analysis
Topic models can scan documents, examine words and phrases within them, and “learn” groups of words that characterize those documents.
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Detecting subjectivity and tone with automated text analysis tools
There are a variety of tools that can help researchers analyze large volumes of written material. In this post, I’ll examine two of these…
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How to break regression
Regression models are a cornerstone of modern social science. Yet social scientists can run into a lot of situations where regression…
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Using APIs to collect website data
At Pew Research Center, we regularly use APIs to collect information for the studies we produce. Web APIs provide a means of communication between websites and users, structured by rules.
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How to analyze Pew Research Center survey data in R
Pew Research Center releases its survey data publicly as IBM SPSS files with the .sav extension. But if you don’t have access to SPSS, there are free, open-source tools available to analyze and make use of the data.
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Welcome to Decoded!
An introduction to the methodological musings, puzzles and tangles that you would see if you could flip those picture-perfect research products over.
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About Decoded
A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center.
For our latest research findings, visit pewresearch.org.
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