The Social Science and Social Media Collaborative
Have established models of social and political processes lost their predictive power?
Recent events, such as incorrect predictions of the 2016 election outcome and the spread of misinformation, present an opportunity to challenge old models with new sources of data.
The abundance of data from social media presents an opportunity to understand social and political trends better.
But first, researchers must address issues concerning the use of this data. Is it representative? Are users honest about their thoughts? Is the collection and processing of the data unbiased and accurate?
This study incorporates five parallel projects to address these issues and harness the opportunity to use new data to gain a better understanding of social and political phenomena.
Methodology
Methodological issues surrounding social surveys and from social media
Political Communication
Parenting
Misinformation
What types of misinformation “sticks” and how does it spread on social media
Economic Indicators
Developing economic indicators using social media data
Each of the five projects have specific substantive focus areas, but are linked through the use of data science methods, big data resources, and the use of high performance computing.
What’s New
Analysis: News Coverage on President Trump Impacting Midterm Campaigns
Josh Pasek, Stuart Soroka and Mike Traugott of S3MC contributed to a recent study that is conducted in collaboration with SurveyMonkey and The Washington Post. They found that those who love Trump and those who hate him are paying the most attention to him.
New Publication: The Stability of Economic Correlations over Time
A new paper examining the use of Twitter data has been published in Public Opinion Quarterly. The study uses knowledge of the processes generating Twitter data to develop and test hypotheses for when social media and survey data might align, and thus when social media processes may reflect survey measures.
Analysis: The Kavanaugh saga reminded Republicans of a big reason to vote in November: Stopping Democrats
A new survey suggests that the debate over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court may have led Republicans to increasingly focus on their dislike of Democrats when thinking about voting in the 2018 midterm elections.
Conference: S3MC Presentations at BigSurv18
BigSurv18 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on October 25-27, 2018. Researchers affiliated with the S3MC studies will give several presentations at BigSurv18.
Featured: SAGE Ocean features S3MC’s Ceren Budak among women “doing amazing research in computational social science”
In two recent blogposts, SAGE Ocean featured S3MC’s Ceren Budak as one of 50+ women to follow in computational social science.
Conference: S3MC Presentations at DEVSEC18
Researchers affiliated with S3MC gave several presentations at DEVSEC: Conference on the Use of Secondary and Open Source Data in Developmental Science in Phoenix, Arizona, October 4-6, 2018.