Four best practices for measuring news sentiment using ‘off-the-shelf’ dictionaries: a large-scale p-hacking experiment

Abstract

We examined the validity of 37 sentiment indicators based on dictionary-based methods using a large news corpus and demonstrate the risk of generating a spectrum of results with different levels of statistical significance by presenting an analysis of relationships between news sentiment and U.S. presidential approval. We summarize our findings into four best practices: 1) use a theory-informed sentiment dictionary; 2) do not assume that the validity and reliability of the dictionary is ‘built-in’; 3) check for the influence of content length and 4) do not use multiple dictionaries to test the same statistical hypothesis.