Measuring Personal Values Of African Reddit Users Using a Lexicon-Based Approach

Personal values are the fundamental beliefs and ideas that hold great significance for individuals. These values play a crucial role in shaping behavior, with actions misaligned to them potentially triggering negative emotions such as threat or guilt. Traditionally, researchers measure personal values through self-reported surveys; however, scalability becomes an issue when applied on a large scale. For instance, including hundreds of participants from several regions could be daunting and costly, as it requires organizers to conduct and maintain the surveys. Additionally, respondents’ responses could be influenced by their mood, introducing potential bias. In addressing the limitations of traditional survey methods, we propose overcoming scalability challenges by leveraging social media as a valuable resource for analyzing individuals’ writings and extracting their concealed values. Our approach involves the utilization of a values lexicon to systematically analyze posts from Reddit users across 12 African countries.