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Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws
INTRODUCTION: This study employs sentiment analysis (SA) to examine the semantic structures of restrictive and protective abortion bills enacted in 2019. SA is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that uses automation to extract affective indicators (emotive language) from text data. Assess...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer US
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8764246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35069923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13178-022-00690-2 |
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author | Valdez, Danny Goodson, Patricia |
author_facet | Valdez, Danny Goodson, Patricia |
author_sort | Valdez, Danny |
collection | PubMed |
description | INTRODUCTION: This study employs sentiment analysis (SA) to examine the semantic structures of restrictive and protective abortion bills enacted in 2019. SA is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that uses automation to extract affective indicators (emotive language) from text data. Assessing these indicators can help identify whether legal texts are framed, or intentionally biased in their wording. Identifying framing is important for understanding potentially biased interpretations of these laws. METHODS: We identified a sample of 2019 abortion bills using the legislative tracking tool Legiscan and included those that met specified criteria (N = 19 bills). We categorized each bill as restrictive (n = 12) or protective (n = 7). We ran aggregate (i.e., all bills) and separate (protective × restrictive) SA, generating scores that we interpreted qualitatively (higher scores indicated predominance of positive wording). RESULTS: In the aggregate analysis, 56% of text comprised negative terms (44% positive). Restrictive bills contained more negative language than protective bills (67% vs 58%). Although SA scores varied from −222 to +13, two laws scored 0, indicating neutrality. For comparison, the US Constitution’s score equaled 1. CONCLUSION: Our findings confirm SA is useful to examine legal documents for language biases. The abortion bills we assessed seem framed along political ideologies, although the sample provided evidence that neutral wording is possible. POLICY IMPLICATIONS: With the recent additions of conservative-leaning Justices to the US Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is again at the center of partisan conflict. Thus, how abortion laws are framed draws further implications for how they may be interpreted when challenged in the court system. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8764246 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87642462022-01-18 Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws Valdez, Danny Goodson, Patricia Sex Res Social Policy Article INTRODUCTION: This study employs sentiment analysis (SA) to examine the semantic structures of restrictive and protective abortion bills enacted in 2019. SA is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that uses automation to extract affective indicators (emotive language) from text data. Assessing these indicators can help identify whether legal texts are framed, or intentionally biased in their wording. Identifying framing is important for understanding potentially biased interpretations of these laws. METHODS: We identified a sample of 2019 abortion bills using the legislative tracking tool Legiscan and included those that met specified criteria (N = 19 bills). We categorized each bill as restrictive (n = 12) or protective (n = 7). We ran aggregate (i.e., all bills) and separate (protective × restrictive) SA, generating scores that we interpreted qualitatively (higher scores indicated predominance of positive wording). RESULTS: In the aggregate analysis, 56% of text comprised negative terms (44% positive). Restrictive bills contained more negative language than protective bills (67% vs 58%). Although SA scores varied from −222 to +13, two laws scored 0, indicating neutrality. For comparison, the US Constitution’s score equaled 1. CONCLUSION: Our findings confirm SA is useful to examine legal documents for language biases. The abortion bills we assessed seem framed along political ideologies, although the sample provided evidence that neutral wording is possible. POLICY IMPLICATIONS: With the recent additions of conservative-leaning Justices to the US Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is again at the center of partisan conflict. Thus, how abortion laws are framed draws further implications for how they may be interpreted when challenged in the court system. Springer US 2022-01-18 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC8764246/ /pubmed/35069923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13178-022-00690-2 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Valdez, Danny Goodson, Patricia Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title | Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title_full | Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title_fullStr | Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title_full_unstemmed | Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title_short | Neutral or Framed? A Sentiment Analysis of 2019 Abortion Laws |
title_sort | neutral or framed? a sentiment analysis of 2019 abortion laws |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8764246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35069923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13178-022-00690-2 |
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