Abstract
In 2015, United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. Implementing SDGs is an important issue for companies as well as for nations. However, to consistently monitor and evaluate progress towards these goals, major efforts in developing objective indices for measuring the levels of SDGs are essential. Currently almost all SDG studies uniformly use available country-level official statistics to synthesize an SDG index, failing to reflect the feelings and opinions of the general public. In this paper we introduce an SDG Social Index developed by a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm. By using social media text data rather than conventional survey data, this index can measure and evaluate the outspoken feelings and opinions of the public toward the SDGs. Here we produce an SDG Social Index for a global company and statistically assess its effectiveness. This framework for producing an SDG Social Index can easily be extended to make other indices where various text data are available. It can also be easily extended to yield country-specific SDG indices across nations. In Conclusion section we summarize the implications of our approach and discuss limitations and future research areas.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability. (2017). Mapping University contributions to the SDGs. Retrieved December 20 2019 from https://youtu.be/PbET71egLzw.
Bamberger, M., Segone, M., & Tateossian, F. (2016). Evaluating the sustainable development goals with a “No one left behind” lens through equity-focused and gender-responsive evaluations. New York: UN Women.
Böhringer, C., & Jochem, P. E. (2007). Measuring the immeasurable—A survey of sustainability indices. Ecological economics, 63(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.03.008.
Casini, M., Bastianoni, S., Gagliardi, F., Gigliotti, M., Riccaboni, A., & Betti, G. (2019). Sustainable development goals indicators: a methodological proposal for a multidimensional fuzzy index in the Mediterranean area. Sustainability, 11(4), 1198. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11041198.
SDG Compass. (2015). Retrieved December 20 2019 from https://sdgcompass.org.
S Compass (2015) The guide for business action on the SDGs. Geneva, Switzerland World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
Crutzen, P. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a.
Dhaoui, C., Webster, C. M., & Tan, L. P. (2017). Social media sentiment analysis: Lexicon versus machine learning. Journal of Consumer Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCM-03-2017-2141.
Dickens, C., Smakhtin, V., McCartney, M., O’Brien, G., & Dahir, L. (2019). Defining and quantifying National-level targets, indicators and benchmarks for management of natural resources to achieve the sustainable development goals. Sustainability, 11(2), 462. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11020462.
Enríquez, F., Troyano, J. A., & López-Solaz, T. (2016). An approach to the use of word embeddingsin an opinion classification task. Expert Systems with Applications, 66, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2016.09.005.
Grainger-Brown, J., & Malekpour, S. (2019). Implementing the sustainable development goals: A review of strategic tools and frameworks available to organisations. Sustainability, 11(5), 1381. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11051381.
Gruner, R. L., Homburg, C., & Lukas, B. A. (2014). Firm-hosted online brand communities and new product success. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 42(1), 29–48.
Guijarro, F., & Poyatos, J. A. (2018). Designing a sustainable development goal index through a goal programming model: The case of EU-28 countries. Sustainability, 10(9), 3167. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10093167.
Huan, Y., Li, H., & Liang, T. (2019). A new method for the quantitative assessment of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and a case study on central Asia. Sustainability, 11(13), 3504. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11133504.
Kharrazi, A., Qin, H., & Zhang, Y. (2016). Urban big data and sustainable development goals: Challenges and opportunities. Sustainability, 8(12), 1293. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8121293.
Körfgen, A., Förster, K., Glatz, I., Maier, S., Becsi, B., Meyer, A., et al. (2018). It’s a Hit! mapping austrian research contributions to the sustainable development goals. Sustainability, 10(9), 3295. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10093295.
Levy, O., Goldberg, Y., & Dagan, I. (2015). Improving distributional similarity with lessons learned from word embeddings. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3, 211–225. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00134.
Loh, S., Lorenzi, F., Saldaña, R., & Licthnow, D. (2003). A tourism recommender system based on collaboration and text analysis. Information Technology and Tourism, 6(3), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.3727/1098305031436980.
Lozano, R., Fullman, N., Abate, D., Abay, S. M., Abbafati, C., Abbasi, N., et al. (2018). Measuring progress from 1990 to 2017 and projecting attainment to 2030 of the health-related sustainable development goals for 195 countries and territories: A systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2017. The Lancet, 392(10159), 2091–2138. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32281-5.
McAlexander, J. H., Schouten, J. W., & Koenig, H. F. (2002). Building brand community. Journal of marketing, 66(1), 38–54.
Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013). Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint
Misuraca, M., Scepi, G., & Spano, M. (2020). A network-based concept extraction for managing customer requests in a social media care context. International Journal of Information Management, 51, 101956.
Monash University, SDSN Australia/Pacific. (2015). Compiled Keywords for SDG Mapping. Retrieved December 20 2019 from http://ap-unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Compiled-Keywords-for-SDG-Mapping_Final_17-05-10.xlsx.
Nhemachena, C., Matchaya, G., Nhemachena, C. R., Karuaihe, S., Muchara, B., & Nhlengethwa, S. (2018). Measuring baseline agriculture-related sustainable development goals index for southern Africa. Sustainability, 10(3), 849. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10030849.
Pennington, J., Socher, R., & Manning, C. D. Glove (2014) Global vectors for word representation. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP), (pp. 1532-1543).
Perera, S. (2017) Reporting of Swiss and German companies on contributions to the sustainable development goals. Unpublished master’s thesis, ZHAW School of Management and Law, Winterthur. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-2088.
Porter, M. F. (2001) Snowball: A language for stemming algorithms. http://snowball.tartarus.org/texts/introduction.html. Accessed 20 Dec 2019.
Porter, M. F. (1980) An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program: electronic library and information systems, 14(3), 130–137. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb046814.
Preston, M., Scott, L. (2015) Make It Your Business: Engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/sustainability/SDG/SDG%20Research_FINAL.pdf. Accessed 20 Dec 2019.
PwC. (2015). Shaping our future: Global Annual Review 2015. Retrieved December 20 2019 from https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/about-pwc/global-annual-review-2015/campaign-site/pwc-global-annual-review-2015.pdf.
Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Durand-Delacre, D., & Teksoz, K. (2016). SDG index & dashboards: A global report: Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Lafortune, G., & Fuller, G. (2018). Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN); New York: 2018. SDG index and dashboards report.
Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Teksoz, K., Durand-Delacre, D., & Sachs, J. D. (2017). National baselines for the sustainable development goals assessed in the SDG index and dashboards. Nature geoscience, 10(8), 547–555. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2985.
Schnabel, T., Labutov, I., Mimno, D., & Joachims, T. (2015) Evaluation methods for unsupervised word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2015 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing, (pp. 298-307).
Sidorov, G., Gelbukh, A., Gómez-Adorno, H., & Pinto, D. (2014). Soft similarity and soft cosine measure: Similarity of features in vector space model. Computación y Sistemas, 18(3), 491–504.
TextBlob. (2020). Retrieved November 16 2020 from https://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev.
United Nations. (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Retrieved December 20 2019 from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf.
United Nations. (2018). The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2018. New York City.
Woodbridge, M. (2019). Measuring, Monitoring and Evaluating the SDGs. Retrieved December 20 2019 from https://www.localizingthesdgs.org/library/236/ICLEI-SDGs-Briefing-Sheets-06-Measuring-Monitoring-and-Evaluating-the-SDGs.pdf.
Xue, B., Fu, C., & Shaobin, Z. (2014) A study on sentiment computing and classification of sina weibo with word2vec. In 2014 IEEE International Congress on Big Data, (pp. 358-363): IEEE https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.Congress.2014.59.
Funding
Not applicable
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Conceptualization: Raejung Lee, Jinho Kim; Formal analysis: Raejung Lee; Methodology: Raejung Lee; Investigation: Raejung Lee, Jinho.Kim.; Software: Raejung Lee; Validation: Raejung Lee, Jinho Kim.; Writing: Raejung Lee, Jinho Kim; Writing - review & editing: Raejung Lee, Jinho Kim; Supervision: Jinho.Kim
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lee, R., Kim, J. Developing a Social Index for Measuring the Public Opinion Regarding the Attainment of Sustainable Development Goals. Soc Indic Res 156, 201–221 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02643-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02643-5