Mannheim Research Colloquium on Survey Methods (MaRCS): The Automated Coding of 400,000 Open-Ended Answers to the “Most Important Political Problem” Question in the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES)

The German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) routinely asks respondents about "the most important political problem". The open-ended responses sometimes include multiple topics, making manual coding a laborious and costly process. Since 2018, GLES has accumulated over 400,000 such responses. Our project aimed to streamline the coding process by developing a coding scheme and exploring more efficient methods. The outcome, a data product released in October 2023, represents the culmination of our efforts. In this presentation, we will guide you through the journey, from refining the coding scheme to experimenting with diverse models, ultimately employing the Large Language Model BERT for coding the responses.

Please use this link to attend the colloquium via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81804053598?pwd=WUVtaVErWklpSVBBV0N5eGo5eHFkUT09

MaRCS is a seminar series jointly organized by the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), the University of Mannheim School of Social Sciences, and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

You can sign-up to the MaRCS mailing list here https://lists.gesis.org/mailman/listinfo/marcs to receive invitations to the upcoming seminars.