Forget reading piles and piles of articles: Social Media as Research Platforms

There’s an app for everything nowadays. How about one to measure our Gross National Happiness Index? http://apps.facebook.com/gnh_index/ From where is my iPhone, to Brotips, What men/women really want?, Groupon. Social media really has a massive, personal and direct impact on our lives.

Status updates like “Worst morning ever. Starbucks messed up my order” or “Forgot my umbrella today”, may have more implications than you think.

A study conducted through Twitter reveals that during times like Osama bin Laden’s death, Michael Jackson’s death, H1N1 pandemics, the happiness index plummets. What constitutes the indicators of the index, are words with negative or positive connotations like “greed” or “laughter”. The accuracy of studies conducted in such an unconventional way is still being debated. However, it certainly provides a large-scale and quite personal outlook towards the nation’s well-being. It certainly has a higher turnout, either voluntarily or involuntarily, than elections!

In the article, the author writes, “As we have seen in both the work of others and ours, Twitter and similar large-scale, online social networks have thus far provided good evidence that scientifically interesting and meaningful patterns can be extracted from these massive data sources of human behavior,” Dodd and his co-authors wrote. “Finally, the era of big data social sciences has undoubtedly begun. Rather than being transformed or revolutionized we feel the correct view is that the social sciences are expanding beyond a stable core to become data-abundant fields.””

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/happiness-is-down-twitter-study_n_1162644.html?1324482418&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008

I worked as an intern at BBN3 under contract to CHEK news, during the Vancouver Olympics. My job was a researcher, to find relevant and interesting stories to report. While everyone was scrambling to search for a “hook” and catching glimpses of hockey games, I figured out that the best place to check out where everyone was congregating or meeting up, was actually Twitter. Interesting Tweets about coca cola can collections, pin-trading were prevalent in the posts. This is the power of the media. Instead of letting it control your life, why not make good use of it and apply the theories you learnt in school? The trend is to explore social trends via these platforms. Instead of reading irrelevant articles upon articles on happiness and studies, why not try it out and conduct an empirical survey on your own?