Youth Online Behavior Offers Clues to Suicidality

As the world becomes increasingly connected and interdependent upon technology, crimes are moving online. Research on cybercrime is beginning to test the applicability of traditional criminological theories for understanding crime in this new medium. Using a national sample of 215 self-admitted cybercriminals, we examine Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory. Negative binomial regressions reveal that expressed levels of institutional anomie correlate with increased cybercrime activity. A curvilinear relationship was found, such that low and high levels of institutional anomie lead to higher levels of cybercrime. Our findings reveal how the dark side of the American Dream can lead to online criminality. Specifically, the penetration of, and accommodation to economic values dictated by American capitalism can lead individuals to adopt values such as the fetishism of money that, in turn, affects their online behavior and criminality.

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Community Connect: A Mock Social Media Platform to Study Online Behavior

Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining ◽

10.1145/3437963.3441698 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Khyati Mahajan ◽

Sourav Roy Choudhury ◽

Sara Levens ◽

Tiffany Gallicano ◽

Samira Shaikh

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Online Behavior ◽

Social Media Platform ◽

Media Platform

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What Instagram Can Teach Us About Bird Photography: The Most Photogenic Bird and Color Preferences

i-Perception ◽

10.1177/20416695211003585 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 204166952110035

Author(s):

Katja Thömmes ◽

Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring

Keyword(s):

Online Community ◽

Online Behavior ◽

Color Preferences ◽

Photo Sharing

What makes a great bird photo? To examine this question, we collected over 20,000 photos of birds from the photo-sharing platform Instagram with their corresponding liking data. We standardized the total numbers of Likes and extracted information from the image captions. With this database, we investigated content-related image properties to see how they affect the ubiquitous online behavior of pressing a Like button. We found substantial differences between bird families, with a surprising winner in the category “most instagrammable bird.” The colors of the depicted bird also significantly affected the liking behavior of the online community, replicating and generalizing previously found human color preferences to the realm of bird photography.

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Big Data: Some Ethical Concerns for the Social Sciences

Social Sciences ◽

10.3390/socsci10020036 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 36

Author(s):

Michael Weinhardt

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Big Data ◽

Ethical Issues ◽

Online Behavior ◽

Ethical Concerns ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

The Social ◽

And Behaviors ◽

State Actors

While big data (BD) has been around for a while now, the social sciences have been comparatively cautious in its adoption for research purposes. This article briefly discusses the scope and variety of BD, and its research potential and ethical implications for the social sciences and sociology, which derive from these characteristics. For example, BD allows for the analysis of actual (online) behavior and the analysis of networks on a grand scale. The sheer volume and variety of data allow for the detection of rare patterns and behaviors that would otherwise go unnoticed. However, there are also a range of ethical issues of BD that need consideration. These entail, amongst others, the imperative for documentation and dissemination of methods, data, and results, the problems of anonymization and re-identification, and the questions surrounding the ability of stakeholders in big data research and institutionalized bodies to handle ethical issues. There are also grave risks involved in the (mis)use of BD, as it holds great value for companies, criminals, and state actors alike. The article concludes that BD holds great potential for the social sciences, but that there are still a range of practical and ethical issues that need addressing.

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Google search behavior for meningitis and its vaccines: an infodemiological study

BMC Neurology ◽

10.1186/s12883-021-02258-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

Author(s):

John Angelo Luigi S. Perez ◽

Adrian I. Espiritu ◽

Roland Dominic G. Jamora

Keyword(s):

Influenza Vaccine ◽

Pneumococcal Vaccine ◽

Rank Correlation ◽

Infectious Agents ◽

Online Behavior ◽

Online Search ◽

Search Volume ◽

Search Patterns ◽

Google Search ◽

The Relationship

Abstract Background The internet has made significant contributions towards health education. Analyzing the pattern of online behavior regarding meningitis and vaccinations may be worthwhile. It is hypothesized that the online search patterns in meningitis are correlated with its number of cases and the search patterns of its related vaccines. Methods This was an infodemiological study that determined the relationship among online search interest in meningitis, its worldwide number of cases and its associated vaccines. Using Google Trends™ Search Volume Indices (SVIs), we evaluated the search queries “meningitis,” “pneumococcal vaccine,” “BCG vaccine,” “meningococcal vaccine” and “influenza vaccine” in January 2021, covering January 2008 to December 2020. Spearman rank correlation was used to determine correlations between these queries. Results The worldwide search interest in meningitis from 2008 to 2020 showed an average SVI of 46 ± 8.8. The most searched topics were symptoms, vaccines, and infectious agents with SVIs of 100, 52, and 39, respectively. The top three countries with the highest search interest were Ghana, Kazakhstan, and Kenya. There were weak, but statistically significant correlations between meningitis and the BCG (ρ = 0.369, p < 0.001) and meningococcal (ρ = 0.183, p < 0.05) vaccines. There were no statistically significant associations between the number of cases, influenza vaccine, and pneumococcal vaccine. Conclusion The relationships among the Google SVIs for meningitis and its related vaccines and number of cases data were inconsistent and remained unclear. Future infodemiological studies may expand their scopes to social media, semantics, and big data for more robust conclusions.

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