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Data Mining in Social Sciences: A Decision Tree Application Using Social and Political Concepts

  • Efthalia Massou ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Gerasimos Prodromitis ORCID logo and Stamos Papastamou ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: November 30, 2022
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Statistics, Politics and Policy
From the journal Statistics, Politics and Policy Volume 13 Issue 3

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the utility of data mining to classify individuals into predefined categories of a target variable, based on their social and political attitude. Data collected for a social psychology study conducted in Greece in 1994 were used for this purpose. We established the theoretical background of our analysis through explanatory factor analysis. We ran the decision tree algorithm CHAID in order to build a predictive model that classifies the study participants in terms of their attitude toward physical and symbolic violence. The CHAID algorithm provided a decision tree that was easily interpreted, and which revealed meaningful predictive patterns. CHAID algorithm showed satisfactory predictive ability and promising alternatives to social psychology data analysis. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other evidence in the literature that the decision tree algorithms can be used to identify latent variables.

Keywords: data mining; social sciences; social psychology; decision trees; CHAID
Corresponding author: Efthalia Massou, Primary Care Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0SR, UK; and Laboratory of Experimental and Social Psychology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece, E-mail:

  1. Research funding: Not applicable.

  2. Declarations of interest: None.

  3. Availability of data and material: Data are hold from the Laboratory of Experimental and Social Psychology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece and are available upon request to the corresponding author.

  4. Code availability: Upon request.

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Received: 2022-04-01
Accepted: 2022-09-21
Published Online: 2022-11-30
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Special on Social Media and Machine Learning Research
  4. Political Polarisation on Gender Equality: The Case of the Swiss Women’s Strike on Twitter
  5. COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccination Intentions among Social Media Users
  6. Data Mining in Social Sciences: A Decision Tree Application Using Social and Political Concepts
  7. Inequality and International Communication
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https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2022-0004
Keywords for this article
data mining; social sciences; social psychology; decision trees; CHAID

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Special on Social Media and Machine Learning Research
  4. Political Polarisation on Gender Equality: The Case of the Swiss Women’s Strike on Twitter
  5. COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccination Intentions among Social Media Users
  6. Data Mining in Social Sciences: A Decision Tree Application Using Social and Political Concepts
  7. Inequality and International Communication
  8. Lower Inequality and Lower Development: A Contradiction Sensitivity Analysis of Jammu and Kashmir
  9. The Aspects of International Communication: Strategic Partnership of Ukraine and Turkey
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