Make sure you have all the packages installed from “How to run basic analysis in R” plus the following:
install.packages(c("SentimentAnalysis", "textclean", "tidytext",
"tm", "tokenizers"))
If you need to merge datasets before you can begin (e.g., you’ve got some results from LIWC and some from Evaluative Lexicon and you want to put them together) you can have a look at the merge section in “How to run basic analysis in R”
Remember to follow the basic rules about importing data from Qualtrics into R (i.e., deleting the second header line from the excel data before importing it)
If you want to run an analysis on the text variables once you’ve got them, you will probably need to load in the following packages
library(dplyr)
library(effectsize)
library(emmeans)
library(mediation)
library(ggplot2)
library(SentimentAnalysis)
There is always some pre-processing you need to do to text before analyzing it, like stemming and removing stopwords. You will see this below when we get into custom text analysis. For now, all you need to know is that SentimentAnalysis does these steps automatically for us.
The Sentiment Analysis R package can give you a variety of outputs, namely:
| VariableName | Dictionary | Description |
|---|---|---|
| WordCount | NA | how many words are in the text? |
| SentimentGI | Harvard-IV dictionary | |
| NegativityGI | Harvard-IV dictionary | |
| PositivityGI | Harvard-IV dictionary | |
| SentimentHE | Henry’s Financial dictionary (Henry 2008) | |
| NegativityHE | Henry’s Financial dictionary (Henry 2008) | |
| PositivityHE | Henry’s Financial dictionary (Henry 2008) | |
| SentimentLM | Loughran-McDonald Financial dictionary (Loughran and McDonald 2011) | |
| NegativityLM | Loughran-McDonald Financial dictionary (Loughran and McDonald 2011) | |
| PositivityLM | Loughran-McDonald Financial dictionary (Loughran and McDonald 2011) | |
| RatioUncertaintyLM | Loughran-McDonald Financial dictionary (Loughran and McDonald 2011) | |
| SentimentQDAP | QDAP dictionary from the package qdapDictionaries |
|
| NegativityQDAP | QDAP dictionary from the package qdapDictionaries |
|
| PositivityQDAP | QDAP dictionary from the package qdapDictionaries |
Because SentimentAnalyzer can give you so much, it’s best to specify what you want. For example, if I’m interested in getting overall sentiment based on each of the four dictionaries and creating a column for each in my dataframe, I would write:
dta$sentiment.GI <- analyzeSentiment(dta$Text)$SentimentGI
dta$sentiment.LM <- analyzeSentiment(dta$Text)$SentimentLM
dta$sentiment.QDAP <- analyzeSentiment(dta$Text)$SentimentQDAP
dta$sentiment.HE <- analyzeSentiment(dta$Text)$SentimentHE
| dta$sentiment.X ← | analyzeSentiment | (dta$Text) | $SentimentX |
|---|---|---|---|
| the name of the new variable in my existing dataset (called “dta”) | the function from the SentimentAnalaysis package | the name of the variable in your dataset that contains the text you want analyzed | the name of the function from the SentimentAnalysis package that you wish to run, chosen from the table above |
Words in pink are variables you can re-name in this code to whatever you want