Reply to Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They used *word frequency* analysis?
What?[/quote]

This is a flawed study for several reasons and it wouldn’t get close to acceptance at a real journal after peer review.

I feel bad for the authors in some ways.  They say this is a four year project.  That is nothing but sad.  Counting word numbers from web-scraped data probably would have been enough to get a paper accepted in 2000, but the field has come a long way in 20 years.  Netscape is no longer a cutting-edge browser; machine learning has provided text analysis tools.

For me, the biggest problem is — what is the paper even trying to show?  It seems like their main conclusion is “wealthy parents want to send their kids to schools in wealthier wards.”  But of course this is true. Housing segregation and real estate prices shape schools.  We know this. It’s trivial and everyone affiliated with DCPS knows it.

I will write a more detailed critique of the paper based on my experience as an empirical social scientist.  However, as a reviewer my main point would be “so what?  Your major point is obvious and the controversial things you say are just unsupported by data.”  [/quote]

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