BACKGROUND A form of social networking, Twitter is considered a useful means of communication, particularly with millennials. This method was chosen based on current literature exploring the characteristics of millennial students. METHOD Ahern's Model of Adolescent Resilience served as the theoretical framework. Participants were 70 junior-level baccalaureate nursing students, ages 19-23, at two state-supported universities. RESULTS Twitter was found to be a convenient, cost-effective, and enjoyable means of intervention delivery for the researcher. Participants in the experimental and control groups expressed positive feelings about the use of Twitter. CONCLUSION The findings contribute to future efforts to use social media in nursing research and education to increase faculty-student engagement, promote critical reflection, provide social support, reinforce course content, and increase the sense of community.

Twitter may be useful for learning about indoor tanning behavior and attitudes. The objective of this study was to analyze the content of tweets about indoor tanning to determine the extent to which tweets are posted by people who tan, and to characterize the topics of tweets. We extracted 4,691 unique tweets from Twitter using the terms “tanning bed” or “tanning salon” over 7 days in March 2016. We content analyzed a random selection of 1,000 tweets, double-coding 20% of tweets (κ = 0.74, 81% agreement). Most tweets (71%) were by tanners (n = 699 individuals) and included tweets expressing positive sentiment about tanning (57%), and reports of a negative tanning experience (17%), burning (15%), or sleeping in a tanning bed (9%). Four percent of tweets were by tanning salon employees. Tweets posted by people unlikely to be tanners (15%) included tweets mocking tanners (71%) and health warnings (29%). The term “tanning bed” had higher precision for identifying individuals who engage in indoor tanning than “tanning salon”; 77% versus 45% of tweets captured by these search terms were by individuals who engaged in indoor tanning, respectively. Extrapolating to the full data set of 4,691 tweets, findings suggest that an average of 468 individuals who engage in indoor tanning can be identified by their tweets per day. The majority of tweets were from tanners and included reports of especially risky habits (e.g., burning, falling asleep). Twitter provides opportunity to identify indoor tanners and examine conversations about indoor tanning.

The rise of social media and the “retail investor” has completely shifted the investing landscape. A new paradigm has been created where people have easier access than ever to invest in the stock market from the convenience of their phones. This is accomplished through zero-commission trading apps, like Robinhood, meaning less starting capital is required. This research is used to investigate the relationship between the frequency of social media mentions on Twitter and a particular stock’s volatility. It is hypothesized that Twitter mentions will affect stock volatility. This will be done using the qualitative data analyzing tool AtlasTi to calculate the frequency in which a particular stock ticker is mentioned on Twitter during trading hours. Using AtlasTi, the number of mentions for twenty-eight individual stocks was monitored twice a day for twenty total trading days, or approximately one month. This resulted in forty individual time frames of data, or 1,120 total data points. The volatility of the stock will then be calculated using data from Yahoo! Finance. Using panel data analysis, the number of stock mentions on Twitter will be cross-checked with the volatility of the correlating stock under the same time period to evaluate the relationship between the two variables. While our final analysis has not yet been calculated, it is expected that our results will show a relationship between heavily mentioned stocks and increased volatility. It is intended that our research will aid future investors when making decisions on how to invest in assets heavily mentioned on social media.

Coal is a highly controversial energy source that has been widely perceived as environmentally harmful but socially important to regions with historical ties to coal production. Gauging public perception of coal is important to contemporary matters in energy policies like energy transition and the future of coal mining. Previous studies have demonstrated that public perception of coal can be affected by a multitude of geographic and social factors such as the distance to coal mining areas and political ideology. These studies predominantly relied on traditional survey approaches, which are typically cost prohibitive. With its growing popularity in public communication, social media has been recognized as an essential means of crowd-sourcing public perception and opinions. However, there is a general paucity of energy perception studies underpinned by social media, especially public perception of coal. Based on the Twitter data downloaded in August 2019, this thesis mapped the patterns of public perception of coal in the contexts of geographic spaces and social media network using data mining approaches. Generalized linear models were used to examine the quantitative relationship between public perception and explanatory geographic and social variables. The results demonstrate the geographic distance to coal mining regions, social network clusters, and certain social identities (i.e., environmental/renewable communities, Republicans, news and experts) have significant effects on coal-related sentiments by Twitter users, which are consistent with the results from other survey-based studies. The coal-related sentiments are found to be generally more similar among those Twitter users who are geographically distant, and socially close based on Twitter conversation network. This work suggests that social media may be a robust approach for future energy research in social science.

Governments and municipalities need to understand their citizens’ psychological needs in critical times and dangerous situations. COVID-19 brings lots of challenges to deal with. We propose NeedFull, an interactive and scalable tweet analysis platform, to help governments and municipalities to understand residents’ real psychological needs during those periods. The platform mainly consists of four parts: data collection module, data storage module, data analysis module and data visualization module. The whole process of how data flows in the system is illustrated as follows: Our crawlers in the data collection module gather raw data from a popular social network website Twitter. Then the data is fed into our human need detection model in the data analysis module before stored into the database. When a user enters a query through the user interface, they will get all the related items in the database by the index system of the data storage module and a comprehensive human needs analysis of these items is then presented and depicted in the data visualization module. We employed the proposed platform to investigate the reaction of people in four big regions including New York, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic by collecting tweets posted during this period. The results show that the most pronounced human need in these tweets is relatedness with 51.32%, followed by autonomy with 22.56% and competence with 18.82%. And the percentages of tweets expressing frustration are larger than those of tweets expressing satisfaction for each psychological need in general.

This study examines the incorporation of Twitter in a first-year composition classroom, and addresses the following question: “How can using Twitter as a pedagogical resource to teach writing benefit both students and professors?” The study employs mixed-methods, including surveys, textual analysis of student tweets, and an interview with the professor to assess the application and outcomes of using Twitter. The research finds that although students use social media for a significant amount of time daily, bringing it into the classroom does not automatically lead to better engagement or improved writing. However, students in this study did demonstrate a differentiated used of rhetorical conventions, based on their audience. And, Twitter was instrumental in furnishing real-world writing topics that students chose for themselves, appealing to their interests. This thesis concludes with suggestions for incorporating social media, in general, and Twitter, in particular, into the writing classroom.

Donald Trump’s tweets have become prevalent in today’s society. Because college students use social media so often, it would be incumbent for the researcher to examine the impact Donald Trump’s tweets might have on these young adults’, civic engagement and how the tweets may be affecting his perceived credibility and expertise. The researcher administered a questionnaire to 350 college students from a private medium sized west coast university using various modified scales examining credibility, expertise and civic engagement. Civic engagement was measured using an adapted version of several civic engagement instruments. The researcher used a correlation analysis to offer answers for the proposed research questions. It was found that Donald Trump’s tweets have a significant positive impact on the way college students perceive him to be credible while also effecting their perception of his level of expertise. The tweets did not indicate a correlation to civic engagement, but further research concluded that specific tweets have the ability to have a significant negative correlation on civic attitudes and behaviors. The correlation analysis also found that there was a significant negative correlation between which form of media students use the most and their civic engagement. A regression analysis was performed to see if the tweets had predicting power on college student perception of his credibility and expertise. The tweets demonstrated predicting power. A regression analysis was done to see if the tweets had predicting power on college student civic engagement; the regression results showed no significant predicting power between the two. These results suggest that tweets from a United States President have a significant influence on how he is perceived to be credible, the perception of his level of expertise and how his tweets may be affecting civic engagement on college campuses.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第19694号 / 工博第4149号 / 新制||工||1640(附属図書館) / 32730 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科都市社会工学専攻 / (主査)教授 小林 潔司, 教授 藤井 聡, 准教授 松島 格也 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

Sedan dess tillkomst på sent 1990-tal har sociala medier revolutionerat kommunikations- och interaktionsmönster mellan individer, och till följd påverkat och förändrat diverse yrkesområden. Detta examensarbete utforskar sociala mediers roll inom den svenska fotbollsjournalistiken. Vi undersöker hur svenska fotbollsjournalister idag använder sociala medier som ett arbetssverktyg, utforskar förändringar i arbetsrutiner samt de möjligheter och utmaningar för den svenska fotbollsjournalistiken som sociala medier medför. Med utgångspunkt i teorier om professionalisering och deprofessionalisering, hybriditet och hybridisering samt befintlig forskning om sociala medier, journalistik och sportjournalistik, analyserar denna studie data som samlats in genom kvalitativa intervjuer med åtta svenska fotbollsjournalister. Vi kan konstatera att fotbollsjournalisterna har anammat sociala mediers möjligheter som en ny medieform i stor utsträckning, och samtliga respondenter använder sociala medier som ett arbetsverktyg i stor utsträckning. Med hjälp av framför allt Twitter söker fotbollsjournalisterna efter information, nyheter och källor, samt tillåts förstå nyhetsflödet och den förändrande diskursen bland dess målgrupp. Vidare kan vi konstatera att sociala medier är ett viktigt verktyg för marknadsföring och byggande av ett personligt varumärke bland fotbollsjournalisterna. Medan sociala medier har försvårat fotbollsjournalisternas arbete med källkritik kan vi däremot konstatera att traditionella journalistiska källkritiska ideal är oförändrade. Slutligen resonerar respondenterna kring skillnaden mellan journalist och influencer i det digitala samhället, och ger uttryck för en frustration kring att gränsdragningen mellan vem som är och inte är journalist inte längre är tydlig.

Collegiate athletic departments are experiencing large financial growth in part to their relationships with sport apparel brands. The big three apparel companies of Nike, adidas, and Under Armour control all athletic department apparel contracts within the Power 5 conferences. This study examined what benefits apparel companies receive from their connection to collegiate basketball teams by analyzing the frequency and use of the brand name and brand hashtag on Twitter by fans of fifteen collegiate sport organizations. Through the lens of the social capital theory, the researcher found a limited connection between the sport apparel brands and the individual basketball teams. The finding suggested that sport apparel brands need to develop a new social media strategy in order to better connection with the collegiate basketball fans in an online environment.