How to make causal inferences using texts

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Abstract

Text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories with large collections of text. Nearly all text-based causal inferences depend on a latent representation of the text, but we show that estimating this latent representation from the data creates underacknowledged risks: we may introduce an identification problem or overfit. To address these risks, we introduce a split-sample workflow for making rigorous causal inferences with discovered measures as treatments or outcomes. We then apply it to estimate causal effects from an experiment on immigration attitudes and a study on bureaucratic responsiveness.

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APA

Egami, N., Fong, C. J., Grimmer, J., Roberts, M. E., & Stewart, B. M. (2022). How to make causal inferences using texts. Science Advances, 8(42). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg2652

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