Boston University School of Public Health + Sharecare Partnership
BUSPH has partnered with digital health company Sharecare to improve the way in which Sharecare measures well-being in the United States. Sharecare has historically assessed well-being using the Well Being Index (WBI), a nationally representative survey designed to measure wellness across five dimensions - physical, financial, social, community and purpose. The goal of this collaboration is to understand the ways in which social and physical context influence WBI scores by building the Community Well Being Index (CWBI) - a measure that includes state, county and MSA social determinants of health. I am co-leading a team of researchers responsible for aggregating and storing a large volume of social determinants data across over 60 unique datasets, and leveraging factor analysis and structural equation modeling to understand how these determinants weave together to influence health. You can learn more about this effort here and here.
Representation & Quality of Digital Data for Health Research
Digital data are increasingly attractive sources for information regarding the health and well being of individuals. However, one significant challenge of using these data is that they are demographically biased and do not contain demographic information about the individuals posting. This project seeks to assess the representativeness of health-related data gathered from Twitter by automatically predicting the demographic traits of users tweeting. Using a machine learning approach, we seek to develop and implement simple, scalable tools for detecting Twitter users' age, race and gender and apply these to tweets regarding obesity and foodborne illness at the national level. To learn more about this project, visit the website of Dr. Elaine Nsoesie, project P.I.
You can also access our white paper reviewing existing approaches toward the automatic detection of social media users' demographics here. Publications associated with this project are available in Palgrave Communications and BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. A discussion of the ethical implications of this work is available in the Companion Publication of the 10th Annual ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci ‘19).
Social Media and Public Mourning on Twitter
Emerging work in the field of social media and mourning suggests that social media sites encourage users to maintain continuing bonds with the deceased, and help mourners establish community with one another. These studies have primarily examined Facebook and Myspace, two highly personalized social media spaces. However, it is possible that conversations and behaviors regarding death and mourning vary according to the features and norms of usage within particular sites. In this paper, we analyze the tweet-feeds of deceased Twitter users and find that on Twitter these processes are more diverse than early studies of social media suggest. We find that Twitter users engage in a unique blend of public and private behavior pertaining to death and mourning, and that comments left for the deceased within this space range from highly personal, intimate communications to abstracted and impersonal. Overall, our findings suggest that the structure and function of Twitter has broadened the scope of conversations about death and remembrance in contemporary Western culture by fostering behaviors that incorporate a blend of personal and public communication.
This study is published in Mortality. You can learn more about this project via UW Today. It was also covered by Mashable, Bustle, LiveScience, the Washington Post, and Seattle's local NPR station, KOUW.
Using Twitter for Demographic and Social Science Research
Despite recent and growing interest in using Twitter to examine human behavior and attitudes, there is still significant room for growth regarding the ability to leverage Twitter data for social science research. In particular, gleaning key demographic information about Twitter users - a key component of much social science research - remains a challenge. This central component of this project is a paper that develops an accurate and reliable process for extracting demographic information from social media sites based on data encoded as images rather than text using crowdsourced human intelligence. The methods described in this paper have been applied to a variety of other projects, including an assessment of same-race connectedness within associative networks on Twitter, an examination of how users within different racial categories discuss the issue of gun control on Twitter, and analysis of variation in Twitter profile content by race and gender. I also helped facilitate a workshop hosted by IUSSP designed to make digital data more accessible to demographers at the 2016 Population Association of America annual conference.
United We Tweet? A Quantitative Analysis of Racial Differences in Twitter Use (dissertation - available on ProQuest)
This study is grounded in the perspective that individuals who use Twitter exist within a racialized social structure, and that if handed a flexible platform for communication they may establish different patterns of use. It acknowledges Twitter as a novel social context in which users co-create meaning and structure, and is informed by theory addressing the role of race and racial identity within both online and offline spaces. Chapters analyze black-white racial variation in self-presentation, site use, and network formation using digital traces from two datasets of Twitter of users in the United States. Results indicate that while Twitter is in many ways a race-neutral context, black users are less likely to disclose personal identity indicators, tend to tweet at others less frequently and with a smaller volume of personal ties, and often have higher levels of racial homophily within their networks than white users. White users are more outwardly vocal, more likely to disclose personal identity indicators, and more likely to engage with Twitter as an information space. Overall, Twitter appears not to be immune to the influence of offline biases and identities, and there are some black users for whom the narrative of Black Twitter – or Twitter as a community building space – may hold true.