rgs 2021
text mining for the american dream
This study examines the idea that more money is failing to buy more happiness in America, as data show a flat trend in recent decades, before assessing whether or not the “dream home” hinders the very dream it instantiates. I construct a linguistic corpus from captions of 500 episodes of a reality television programme—“House Hunters”—to explore whether or not individuals make appropriate hedonic considerations (based on the psychological literature on life satisfaction) when purchasing a house. In doing so, I count and interrelate words, bigrams and trigrams to analyse American home buying. Using information mined from transcripts, I code locations for each episode and find variations in preference. In conclusion, twinning this with ethnographies of families living in comparable homes, I find that Americans focus on trivial aspects of the home—material finishes or the yard—that research suggests will go unused or unappreciated after purchase. Yet not all geographies suffer the same biases: leisure activities are walking distances are more considered in warmer climes; size more so in cooler regions. The show creates a window through which we can see the geographies of the American dream home and critically engage with whether or not that conception of home is suited to deliver happiness. Slides can be found here.
