Data-Driven Content Analysis of Social Media

Author(s):  
H. Andrew Schwartz ◽  
Lyle H. Ungar

Researchers have long measured people’s thoughts, feelings, and personalities using carefully designed survey questions, which are often given to a relatively small number of volunteers. The proliferation of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, offers alternative measurement approaches: automatic content coding at unprecedented scales and the statistical power to do open-vocabulary exploratory analysis. We describe a range of automatic and partially automatic content analysis techniques and illustrate how their use on social media generates insights into subjective well-being, health, gender differences, and personality.

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (19) ◽  
pp. 10165-10171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kokil Jaidka ◽  
Salvatore Giorgi ◽  
H. Andrew Schwartz ◽  
Margaret L. Kern ◽  
Lyle H. Ungar ◽  
...  

Researchers and policy makers worldwide are interested in measuring the subjective well-being of populations. When users post on social media, they leave behind digital traces that reflect their thoughts and feelings. Aggregation of such digital traces may make it possible to monitor well-being at large scale. However, social media-based methods need to be robust to regional effects if they are to produce reliable estimates. Using a sample of 1.53 billion geotagged English tweets, we provide a systematic evaluation of word-level and data-driven methods for text analysis for generating well-being estimates for 1,208 US counties. We compared Twitter-based county-level estimates with well-being measurements provided by the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index survey through 1.73 million phone surveys. We find that word-level methods (e.g., Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count [LIWC] 2015 and Language Assessment by Mechanical Turk [LabMT]) yielded inconsistent county-level well-being measurements due to regional, cultural, and socioeconomic differences in language use. However, removing as few as three of the most frequent words led to notable improvements in well-being prediction. Data-driven methods provided robust estimates, approximating the Gallup data at up to r = 0.64. We show that the findings generalized to county socioeconomic and health outcomes and were robust when poststratifying the samples to be more representative of the general US population. Regional well-being estimation from social media data seems to be robust when supervised data-driven methods are used.


Author(s):  
Kathy McKay ◽  
Sarah Wayland ◽  
David Ferguson ◽  
Jane Petty ◽  
Eilis Kennedy

In the UK, tweets around COVID-19 and health care have primarily focused on the NHS. Recent research has identified that the psychological well-being of NHS staff has been adversely impacted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study was to investigate narratives relating to the NHS and COVID-19 during the first lockdown (26 March–4 July 2020). A total of 123,880 tweets were collated and downloaded bound to the time period of the first lockdown in order to analyse the real-time discourse around COVID-19 and the NHS. Content analysis was undertaken and tweets were coded to positive and negative sentiments. Five main themes were identified: (1) the dichotomies of ‘clap for carers’; (2) problems with PPE and testing; (3) peaks of anger; (4) issues around hero worship; and (5) hints of a normality. Further research exploring and documenting social media narratives around COVID-19 and the NHS, in this and subsequent lockdowns, should help in tailoring suitable support for staff in the future and acknowledging the profound impact that the pandemic has had.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zadrian Ardi ◽  
Indah Sukmawati

Various studies in the information technology revealed that there has been a change in the trend of internet use in recent years. Internet users in the world prefer to spend time accessing the internet through the social media. Social media with a variety of platforms provides special communities with their own uniqueness and allows users to share lots of content. The members involves creates a new social community with various phenomena, both positive and negative. Counselors in the millennium era are required to have the insight andknowledge that is qualified to deal with the well being conditions of individuals from activities in social media. Counselors are also required to have specific skills in providing handling with the condition of well being individuals related to the impact of activities on social media.


Author(s):  
Éva Kállay ◽  
Alexandra Rebeca Mihoc

"The changes occurring in modern society can significantly influence individuals’ well-being, mental health and even personality traits such as narcissism and perfectionism. Since studies investigating age and gender differences in narcissism and perfectionism have produced mixed results, and the number of studies conducted in Romanian population is scarce, the main aims of this study were to investigate possible age and gender differences in narcissism, perfectionism and several mental-health indicators in a sample of healthy participants, as well as specific association patterns between these variables within each group of participants. Our sample included 465 millennials and 149 participants over 35 years of age. The results indicate that millennials reported significantly lower levels of narcissism and self-oriented perfectionism than the older generations, higher levels of depressive symptoms and lower levels of autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. Female millennials reported lower levels of narcissistic traits and higher levels of socially-prescribed perfectionism, depressive symptoms, personal growth, and positive relations with others than male participants. Older females indicated significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms and loneliness than male participants. Regarding association patterns, in the group of millennial women narcissism was positively correlated with self-oriented, socially-prescribed perfectionism and subjective well-being, and negatively with loneliness, environmental mastery and purpose in life. In millennial males, we found significant positive correlations only between narcissism and subjective well-being and environmental mastery. Our findings may have important implications for the literature regarding millennials and can contribute to the interventions and prevention programs designed to improve their well-being. Keywords: millennials, narcissism, perfectionism, mental health indicators, age and gender differences "


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sciara ◽  
Daniela Villani ◽  
Anna Flavia Di Natale ◽  
Camillo Regalia

Facebook and other social networking sites allow observation of others’ interactions that in normal, offline life would simply be undetectable (e.g., a two-voice conversation viewable on the Facebook wall, from the perspective of a real, silent witness). Drawing on this specific property, the theory of social learning, and the most direct implications of emotional contagion, our pilot experiment (N = 49) aimed to test whether the exposure to others’ grateful interactions on Facebook enhances (a) users’ felt gratitude, (b) expressed gratitude, and (c) their subjective well-being. For the threefold purpose, we created ad hoc Facebook groups in which the exposure to some accomplices’ exchange of grateful messages for 2 weeks was experimentally manipulated and users’ felt/expressed gratitude and well-being were consequently assessed. Results partially supported both hypotheses. Observing others’ exchange of grateful posts/comments on Facebook appeared to enhance participants’ in-person expression of gratitude (i.e., self-reported gratitude expression within face-to-face interactions), but not their direct and subjective experiences of gratitude. Similarly, exposure to others’ grateful messages improved some components of subjective well-being, such as satisfaction with life, but not negative and positive affect. Taken together, however, our preliminary findings suggest for the first time that social networking sites may actually amplify the spreading of gratitude and its benefits. Implications of our results for professionals and future research in the field of health, education, and social media communication are discussed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Francisca León Becerra ◽  
Johana Falcón Pinto

El bienestar se promueve hace muchos años, especialmente se vela por él en la población infanto-juvenil, sin embargo, cuando se pregunta qué es el bienestar muchas son las respuestas, pero pocas las investigaciones respecto a la infancia y menos contextualizadas en situaciones de vulneración de derechos, considerando que son a quienes más se pretende proteger. Es aquí, cuando es necesario escuchar a los adolescentes que han sido vulnerados en sus derechos respecto a la significación de su bienestar subjetivo expresándolo desde su marco de referencia. Con el objetivo de profundizar en las experiencias se utilizó una metodología cualitativa para entender desde la fenomenología los relatos de seis adolescentes pertenecientes al Programa Especializado en Calle (PEC-Renca), que a través del análisis de contenido de categorización emergente, se llegó a los hallazgos que en la significación del bienestar subjetivo de estos adolescentes prima la familia como fuente de todo aquello que les proporciona bienestar, estando juntos en un mismo hogar, con vínculos afectivos y en donde se ejerza una crianza parental. Influyendo así, la familia en todas las áreas de la vida de los adolescentes. Welfare is promoted for many years, especially it watches over him in the child population, however, when asked what is the welfare there are many answers, but little research regarding children and less contextualized in situations of violation of rights, believing them to be protected more. It is here when you need to listen to adolescents who have been violated in their rights regarding the significance of expressing their subjective well-being from their frame of reference. In order to deepen the experience a qualitative methodology to understand from the phenomenology the stories of six teenagers belonging to the Special Street (PEC-Renca) was used, that through content analysis of emerging categorization, it was the findings on the significance of subjective well-being of these adolescents premium family as the source of everything that provides well-being together in the same household, with bonding and wherein aparental upbringing is exercised. Thus influencing the family in all areas of life of adolescents.


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