LIWC Text Analysis
LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) is a dictionary-based text-analysis method that counts the proportion of words in a text falling into psychologically and linguistically meaningful categories — such as positive emotion, cognitive processing, social references, and function words like pronouns. Developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues, it has become a workhorse for quantifying the psychological and rhetorical character of communication at scale.
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Sources
- Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24–54. DOI: 10.1177/0261927X09351676 ↗
- Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780761915454
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) Text Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/communication/liwc-text-analysis
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
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