Analyse acoustique de la conviction exprimée dans des réponses de sondage : un raffinement des enquêtes téléphoniques
Surveys by phone usually involve the recording of responses in terms of their literal linguistic content ("yes", "never", politician name, etc.). However, oral responses also possess acoustic aspects that express a degree of conviction of respondents. In current survey techniques, this "extralinguistic" information is not considered although it can be used to predict the respondent’s behavior. This paper aims to demonstrate that acoustic measures of the conviction expressed by respondents can be used to improve the prediction of behaviors as estimated by survey techniques. This demonstration is done in two steps involving two experiments. Experiment 1, conducted in a laboratory setting (n = 25), was designed to isolate the vocal variables associated with the expression of the conviction. This first test served to isolate the relevant measurable variables and "categorical" values that could be used to categorize oral responses. Experiment 2 involved the application of these acoustic measures in the analysis of responses recorded during a pre-election telephone survey conducted by Leger in 2010 (a corpus of 400 interviews). This second experiment showed that a categorization of oral responses (n = 188) based on the basis of values of expressed conviction (as defined in Experiment 1) can improve the prediction of the behavior of voters. The results suggest that oral-survey responses contain measurable acoustic cues that express a degree of conviction, which can be associated with a willingness to produce certain behaviors. The nature of the variables also presents the possibility of an automatic detection. The nature of the variables also presents the possibility of an automatic detection.
Conviction Political survey Acoustic measurements