Hi all,
Our next meeting will be *Wednesday March 11*, where Reagan Mozer will
present research on* "**New approaches for scaling-up human coding efforts
in randomized trials with text-based outcomes*".
*Abstract: *Text data have a long history in social science and education
research. However, these data are notoriously high-dimensional and
characterized by many nuances of language that lack plausible statistical
models. As a result, analysis of text data typically involves intensive
human coding tasks where particular constructs or features of the text are
first defined, and then a collection of documents are inspected and coded
for the presence or absence of these constructs. While this process may be
feasible in studies with smaller sample sizes, the time and resources
required to train and employ multiple human coders frequently poses a
challenge for large-scale efforts. In this talk, I will consider how to
reliably and efficiently extract meaningful constructs from text documents
for the purposes of drawing causal inferences, with an emphasis on the
context of experimental studies where some outcomes of interest are
features of text generated by the trial’s participants. In particular, I
will describe an approach that combines machine learning and survey
sampling methods to streamline the process of hand-coding in a way that is
automatically verified and validated. To illustrate the proposed methods, I
will present results from a pilot analysis of a randomized trial that used
student-generated essays to evaluate the impact of an educational
intervention on students’ writing abilities.
*Where:* CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see this link
<https://map.harvard.edu/?bld=04471&level=9> for directions).
*When: *Wednesday, March 11 at 12noon - 1:30pm.
All are welcome and lunch will be provided.
Best,
Georgie