Overview of the four methods we developed and employed in our studies
| Method | Online sentiment analysis | Automated topic ranking | Thematic probing | Policy landscape analysis |
| Aim | Understanding public attitudes towards a subject over time | Identifying main topics of online discussions | Probe the occurrence of predefined themes in online discussions | Building hypothesis on online policy documents |
| Related methods | Public opinion polls | Qualitative content analysis | Qualitative content analysis | Social network analysis |
| Technical approach | Natural language processing | Statistical big data analysis | Regular expression matching | Crawling, network analysis |