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Understanding the social construction of juvenile delinquency: insights from semantic analysis of big-data historical newspaper collections

Author

Listed:
  • Yu Zhang

    (California State University, Fresno)

  • Adam Davies

    (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

  • ChengXiang Zhai

    (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Abstract

Massive historical newspaper collections contain rich information about the historical development of social issues and constitute a unique resource for studying the social construction of issues such as juvenile delinquency. However, manual analysis of millions of pages of newspaper articles is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a suite of computational methods, including cross-context lexical analysis, dynamic semantic analysis, and valence analysis, to facilitate the study of historical social construction. We apply these methods to ProQuest Historical Newspapers $$^{\textrm{TM}}$$ TM collection in the period of 1790–2006 to study the social construction of juvenile delinquency over this period. Our results show that the proposed methods are effective in revealing insights regarding the social construction of juvenile delinquency, leading to a better understanding of this complex issue and specific hypotheses for further study. Overall, our study shows the great promise of leveraging natural language processing techniques for analyzing historical news data to study social construction of societal issues.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu Zhang & Adam Davies & ChengXiang Zhai, 2024. "Understanding the social construction of juvenile delinquency: insights from semantic analysis of big-data historical newspaper collections," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 1095-1137, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jcsosc:v:7:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s42001-024-00254-x
    DOI: 10.1007/s42001-024-00254-x
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Schneider, Anne & Ingram, Helen, 1993. "Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(2), pages 334-347, June.
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