Introducing news media sentiment analytics to residents’ attitudes research

Abstract

The progress in sentiment analytics and communication research provides a powerful scaffold by which to reexamine the long-debated research on residents’ attitudes toward tourism. To mitigate the limitations of the classical survey-based research method, this study takes a news media sentiment analytics perspective to unveil how the residents’ attitudes toward tourism evolve over time and how socioeconomic factors interact with such evolving attitudes in the context of Hong Kong. Drawn on a news data set containing 72,755 news articles published in Chinese language newspapers, this study computes the overall news sentiments for 156 calendar months since 2003, examines the face validity and nomological validity of the results, and discusses the long-run dynamics between residents’ attitudes and typical socioeconomic factors. This study adds a vital dimension to current residents’ attitudes research and practices from data-scarce to data-rich studies and from static snapshots to dynamic unfolding.