Sentiment analysis in decision sciences research: An illustration to IT governance

We propose a viable procedure to mine opinions from a large collection of texts. We demonstrate how this procedure can be applied in business research by constructing IT governance measures. Specifically, we generate a set of IT governance measures using a multi-label classification method and compare against our proposed sentiment analysis procedure. Using 10-K forms to develop our measures of IT governance, we examine the role of IT governance on firm performance. We find evidence of the five dimensions of IT governance (as proposed by the IT Governance Institute), but only one dimension significantly explains firm performance (i.e., strategic alignment) using the multi-label classification method. Using our new procedure to construct IT governance measures, we find significant evidence of four dimensions in explaining firm performance.