scholarly journals Estimating geographic subjective well-being from Twitter: A comparison of dictionary and data-driven language methods

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):  
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.


Author(s):  
Emmanuel Abokyi ◽  
Dirk Strijker ◽  
Kofi Fred Asiedu ◽  
Michiel N. Daams

AbstractThis study investigates the possible causal relationship between buffer stock operations in Ghanaian agriculture and the well-being of smallholder farmers in a developing world setting. We analyze the differences in the objective and subjective well-being of smallholder farmers who do or do not participate in a buffer stock price stabilization policy initiative, using self-reported assessments of 507 farmers. We adopt a two-stage least square instrumental variable estimation to account for possible endogeneity. Our results provide evidence that participation in buffer stock operations improves the objective and subjective well-being of smallholder farmers by 20% and 15%, respectively. Also, with estimated coefficient of 1.033, we find a significant and robust relationship between objective well-being and subjective well-being among smallholder farmers. This relationship implies that improving objective well-being enhances the subjective well-being of the farmers. We also find that the activities of intermediaries decrease both the objective and subjective well-being of farmers. This study demonstrates that economic, social, and environmental aspects of agricultural life could constitute priorities for public policy in improving well-being, given their strong correlation with the well-being of farmers. Based on the results of this study, we provide a better understanding, which may aid policy-makers, that public buffer stockholding operations policy is a viable tool for improving the well-being of smallholder farmers in a developing country.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004728752098891
Author(s):  
Kreg Lindberg ◽  
Ian E. Munanura ◽  
Chad Kooistra ◽  
Mark D. Needham ◽  
Ladan Ghahramani

Research regarding tourism’s effect on the subjective well-being (SWB) of destination residents has provided important insight, but it generally has relied on indirect analyses and diverse measures. This study used livability theory and a novel contingent SWB method in which respondents directly reported anticipated SWB effects. This method is exploratory, but it provides greater confidence in causal relationships. Results from a general population survey in Oregon (USA) suggested the method functioned as intended. County-level population growth and visitor intensity predicted perceived current impacts of tourism. In turn, perceived impacts predicted change in SWB contingent on a vignette reflecting a 20% increase in tourists. Across all individuals and counties, average SWB changes were negative for the environment domain and positive for other domains. Practical implications are discussed, with the most positive SWB effects from tourism development expected to occur in counties with low visitor intensity, especially those with low population growth.


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.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Meng-Hsiang Hsu ◽  
Chun-Ming Chang ◽  
Shing-Ling Wu

Building upon the perspectives of social capital theory, social support, and experience, this study developed a theoretical model to investigate the determinants of subjective well-being on social media. This study also examined the moderating role of experience on the relationship between subjective well-being and social support. Data collected from 267 social media users in Taiwan were used to test the proposed model. Structural equation modeling analysis was used to test the measurement model and the structural model. The findings reveal that receiving online support and providing online support are the key predictors of subjective well-being. Furthermore, social capital positively influences the reception and provision of online support. Finally, providing online support has a significant effect on the subjective well-being of users with low levels of use experience, while receiving online support exerts a stronger influence on the subjective well-being of users with high levels of use experience.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunt Allcott ◽  
Luca Braghieri ◽  
Sarah Eichmeyer ◽  
Matthew Gentzkow

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus. (JEL D12, D72, D90, I31, L82, L86, Z13)


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