From Measurement Instruments to Data: Leveraging Theory-Driven Synthetic Training Data for Classifying Social Constructs

Computational text classification is a challenging task, especially for multi-dimensional social constructs. Recently, there has been increasing discussion that synthetic training data could enhance classification by offering examples of how these constructs are represented in texts. In this paper, we systematically examine the potential of theory-driven synthetic training data for improving the measurement of social constructs. In particular, we explore how researchers can transfer established knowledge from measurement instruments in the social sciences, such as survey scales or annotation codebooks, into theory-driven generation of synthetic data. Using two studies on measuring sexism and political topics, we assess the added value of synthetic training data for fine-tuning text classification models. Although the results of the sexism study were less promising, our findings demonstrate that synthetic data can be highly effective in reducing the need for labeled data in political topic classification. With only a minimal drop in performance, synthetic data allows for substituting large amounts of labeled data. Furthermore, theory-driven synthetic data performed markedly better than data generated without conceptual information in mind.