Measuring Cultural Diversity in Text with Word Counts

A long-standing concern in the study of culture is understanding how culture is distributed, often discussed in terms of cultural “coherence.” Cultural diversity, defined as the degree to which people share beliefs or meanings, is one dimension of cultural coherence that has been associated with many social outcomes. This article contributes to this area of research by considering how to measure cultural diversity in text and introducing a simple approach that uses word counts and sets of diversity indices (called “diversity profiles”). Text is useful for social-psychological analysis because as an artifact of individual thought, it provides a way to measure how beliefs and meanings are distributed and made salient across groups. The measurement approach outlined here contrasts to many contemporary computational approaches to measuring culture in text, which employ a relational logic of meaning based on word co-occurrences. While these more sophisticated approaches are well suited to measuring diversity in many instances, I show that there are some cases for which simpler measures based on word counts are ideal. After discussing the measurement of cultural diversity using word counts, I present a computational analysis of interview transcripts of American religious parents discussing the ages at which it is appropriate for children to participate in different practices often considered inappropriate for young children. The analysis points to the homogenizing influence of institutions on discussions of age appropriateness. I conclude by discussing implications for cultural analysis more generally.