[Air-L] Twitter Research Question

[Nicholas Bowman]

Theo,
 
Glad to see more folks using Twitter scrapers to capture "in the moment, organic" reactions to public events. However, without more understanding of your specific research questions, it's a bit difficult to give you much feedback. Setting up the analysis parameters is really based on what precisely you are wanting to study (i.e., if you were looking at changes in discourse from before and after an event, you'd need to look at both and analyze for changes in topic? tamber? tone? civility?) 
 
As well, with your content analysis - are you doing a thematic analysis (where you let themes emerge from the data, such as an agenda-setting type study) or are you looking at a theoretically-derived content analysis (such as using affective disposition theory to analyze individuals' reactions towards main protagonists and antagonists, fitting these comments into a coding scheme derived from theory and analyzing change scores in disposition). 
 
If you don't want to e-mail the entire list (although I am sure there are many people besides myself you can help here) you can e-mail me directly at Nicholas.Bowman at mail.wvu.edu. YOu also might look at the recent work of Dr. Art Raney at Florida State University, who has been looking at such techniques in the field of media psychology and communication studies (my home). 


>>> Theo Plothe <tp6316a at student.american.edu> 05-Aug-13 06:10 >>>
I'm at the beginnings of a Twitter study looking at a community's
reaction to a televised event. In my literature review, I'm having a
difficult time justifying when to include the community's tweets
chronologically preceding the event and following the event. For those
of you that do content analysis on social media like Twitter, do any
of you have suggestions? The data has already been collected using a
Twitter scraper. I'm just trying to decide right now how to define the
boundaries for my analysis.

Any suggestions or a study you can point to that uses a similar method
will be helpful.

Thanks,

Theo

-- 
Theo Plothe
Ph.D. Student
Remix Culture and Gaming
American University School of Communication
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