Studying tech adoption with “text-as-data†: Opportunities, pitfalls, and complementarities in the case of transportation

The rapid digitization and publication of local government records presents researchers with an unprecedented chance to study governance processes. In tandem, advances in computer science and statistics—alongside significant increases in computational power—have led to the development of “text-as-data†methods and their application to social science and policy research. This paper evaluates the potential utility of digitized public meeting minutes and video recordings for studying decision-making about technology adoption by local public agencies, using survey data on the same topic as a benchmark. Focusing on transit agencies in California, we evaluate surveys and digitized meeting records with respect to overall data availability, bias in data availability, and the types of information about technology adoption contained. We find that meeting minutes and video recordings are available for more than twice as many agencies than for a state transit agency-sponsored survey, and that the availability of digitized records is not skewed toward larger agencies, as is the case for survey data. Meanwhile, we find important complementarities with respect to the type of information available about technology adoption in these three data sources.