Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data Mining Twitter For Cancer, Diabetes, And Asthma Insights, Kimberly Chulis

Open Access Dissertations

Twitter may be a data resource to support healthcare research. Literature is still limited related to the potential of Twitter data as it relates to healthcare. The purpose of this study was to contrast the processes by which a large collection of unstructured disease-related tweets could be converted into structured data to be further analyzed. This was done with the objective of gaining insights into the content and behavioral patterns associated with disease-specific communications on Twitter. Twelve months of Twitter data related to cancer, diabetes, and asthma were collected to form a baseline dataset containing over 34 million tweets. As …

Facebook Engagement On College Students' Interpersonal And Intrapersonal Functioning, Scott S. Deatherage

Open Access Dissertations

In recent years college students have incorporated social-networking sites, and more specifically Facebook, into their daily lives. Facebook has received empirical attention; attention focused on what students are doing on Facebook, who its users are, and, more recently, why students access Facebook. However, researchers who have assessed motivations for accessing Facebook have emphasized how motivations are associated with certain activities, and have not simultaneously and directly examined how activities and motivations are associated with both maladaptive and adaptive factors of students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal functioning. The purpose of the present study was to examine how Facebook engagement is associated with …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Perceptions And Expectations About The Use Of Social Media To Raise Situational Awareness In Emergency Events, Israa Bukhari

Open Access Theses

Social media transformed the process of crisis communication. This technology enables the user to communicate with emergency officials as well as the whole virtual world in a click of a button. The emergence of social media in emergency management and its role in raising situational awareness is growing tremendously, making it important for emergency officials to better understand the users' needs and perceptions.

This study's goal is to gain a better understanding of the expectations and perceptions that Purdue associates have regarding the use of social media as it relates to emergencies. The set of interviews conducted in this study …