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I began this semester with the intention of blogging a bit about my applied research class. I provided an overview of it and a copy of the syllabus on an earlier post. But since writing that post, I’ve yet to do a follow up… until now.

Edit: There are 2 follow up posts to this post. 1) Looks at activities for this assignment, and 2) provides the assignment itself.

First, let me say that more and more I am trying to decrease my lecturing and spend more time in class with hands on learning, having my students learn by doing rather than just listening – sort of like the flipped classroom Gary Schirr has been discussing recently on his blog.   So this class is really pushing in class projects and experiential learning. Following this approach, in order to introduce students to research, I provided students with the instructions and a lot of structure for their first two projects.

I want to use our second research project as an example. Then, I’ll talk about the pros and cons. The second project was a sentiment analysis of Tweets about a brand I chose and a (realistic but not necessarily real) scenario.

My goals with this project were to teach students:

1. About computer-assisted content analysis. We focused on how it is different from a hand-coded quantitative content analysis (which was the focus of our first project). And its strengths and weaknesses.
2. How to do a basic computer-assisted content analysis using Yoshikoder, an easy to use, free App that works on Mac and PC. So my students can use it at home if needed!
3. About sentiment analysis – what it is, why it is used by organizations to evaluate the online conversation about their brand, and its strengths and weaknesses.
4. How to write up a research report (In the first project, I provided the project overview and requested results and discussion. In the second project, I added a literature review and methods section, and had them write the research objective and research question).

Why I chose to do this project this way: A number of social media analytics tools today are offering sentiment analysis.  There are also sites like socialmention.com that will provide you with a free sentiment analysis of a search term. But how are these analyses conducted? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Are they reliable? Do they mean anything at all? And what do we need to be careful of before accepting them, and thus drawing inferences from them?

So what I wanted my students to do, was to SEE how a sentiment analysis would be conducted by some of those high-price (or no price!) analytic tools. In other words, I want my students to get their hands dirty as opposed to allowing some distant and hidden algorithm to do the analysis for them. I believe gaining hands on experience with this project provides students a more critical lens through which to see and evaluate a sentiment analysis of social media messages.

The Set Up: I provide in the assignment: The Situation or Problem / Campaign goals and objectives (of an imaginary campaign that is ongoing or happened) / benchmarks / KPIs. In this case, the situation had to do with a popular online retail brand and rising customer complains and dissatisfaction as the brand has grown beyond its core base of loyal customers in recent years.

I provide students with the sample of about 1000 Tweets I downloaded and formatted to play nicely with Yoshikoder. The sample comprises of mentions of the brand. This ensures students are all looking at the same dataset, and streamlines (or eliminates I should say) the data collection process to help students focus on other elements of the assignment. For the sentiment analysis,

I rely on the AFINN dictionary, which was designed for sentiment analysis of microblogs. Students learn about what the AFINN is and a little about how linguistic analysis dictionaries are created through research. Students then analyze the Twitter dataset using the AFINN dictionary to determine the sentiment scores. There is no fancy stats being done here. By checking the sentiment analysis output, they simply determine if their KPI (which was a % of positive Tweets about the brand) was met. In this case, the result they are looking for is a % – so simple division. Not scary at all, no SPSS training needed (that comes with a later project).

They also look at the valence of the sentiment (with a range of + or -5) and explore the meaning of that. The students use this information, along with class lecture, other exercises on how to write research reports, etc., to produce their project #2 report.

Again, to reiterate an important point, we discuss the benefits and of this analysis as well as its real weaknesses. Students always bring up the fact that the results lack context – what if someone used the word “bad” meaning good? What about sarcasm? I show them how to use Yoshikoder to look at Keywords in context as a way of addressing this.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of This (and these types of) Projects As I said above,  I am really trying to move away from lecture in favor of experiential learning. Here are some things I’ve noticed. Some may be benefits, others drawbacks, and others a bit of both…

• The focus on this project is not on the stats or the analysis and I provide a lot of the needed information – so it makes for a good ‘getting your feet wet’ project that teaches students other important elements of research.
• It would be nice to teach them more advanced methods of analysis – but I do cover that a bit more later in the semester.
• Students learn through their mistakes and from my feedback as opposed to me paving the way for them and simply asking them to drive down the smooth road.
• I provide a LOT of handouts on how to write different sections of a research report, etc. They are detailed… sometimes too detailed and I fear students don’t read them because it is information shock.
• Sometimes, I wish I had more time to teach them how to avoid the simple mistakes I see in their work, particularly their research reports. I say to myself, “oh man, I thought I told them how to do that.” Or, “Why didn’t you read the handout that explains how to structure this!?”
• They likely won’t do sentiment analysis like this every again – but at least they’ll understand it!
• They get to see the results for themselves and get a sense that they discovered the results.
• Class time is busy – our class rushes by and we don’t always get to cover everything I want to. As a person who likes order and time management, I am having to “let go a little” and let things happen. This is helping me grow. I wonder if it is helping my students though…
• I know I enjoy doing these sorts of projects a lot more than standing and lecturing, lecturing, lecturing about research. I feel it has made research a lot more “real” and hands on to them.

So that is my overview of the project in general, and some thoughts. It isn’t perfect but it seems to have gone well and I really enjoyed doing it. I’d love any feedback or suggestions you may have to make this the best possible experience for my students. And of course, feel free to adapt, modify, or improve upon this idea.

In an upcoming post(s), I’ll share the assignments (I want to move my documents over to SlideShare due to the pay wall on Scribd). And I will provide some basic info on how to use the Yoshikoder software.

Cheers! -Matt

Just a reminder: There are 2 follow up posts to this post. 1) Looks at activities for this assignment, and 2) provides the assignment itself.

photo CC by netzkobold