[Air-L] Research on Twitter - a couple of questions

[Monica Barratt]

Dear AoIR members

Recently there have been more scholarly articles published using
Twitter data in the health field. I've found myself as a peer-reviewer
of one such article. In case the authors happen to be subscribed, I'll
keep the exact topic quiet... but basically what the authors are doing
is using Twitter's advanced search function to compile a database of
Tweets which they then subject to a simple content analysis.

I have done my own research and discussed the issue with local expert
Axel Bruns, however I'm still a bit unclear on a couple of points, and
wondered if anyone reading could assist me:

1. The authors draw samples of Tweets over a specific time frame from
specified US cities. They appear to assume that by using the advanced
search option 'Near this place' and entering the city name will bring
up all tweets from that city or surrounds (see
https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced ). But wouldn't that only bring
up the tweets from people who have nominated their home city or
geolocated their tweets? Don't many users do neither of these things
and therefore the corpus of data would be incomplete?

Can anyone verify this ... and also does anyone know if there is any
research on the proportion of Twitter users whose location would be
known and therefore would be included in such a dataset?

2. The authors use profile images to ascertain the approximate age and
gender of account holders. In my experience, many people use profile
images that do not represent themselves - eg. celebrities or past
images of themselves or images of themselves with others.

Is this an accurate or useful way of dealing with Twitter profile data
or is it too flawed as a technique to be useful?

While I'm not an expert in Twitter research, it seems to me that
Twitter research is on more solid ground when using a hashtag to
identify a corpus of Tweets, as this is the method Twitter users
employ too.

Thanks for your thoughts/help

Monica

Research Fellow @ National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University