IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/socres/v18y2013i3p74-84.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter

Author

Listed:
  • Luke Sloan
  • Jeffrey Morgan
  • William Housley
  • Matthew Williams
  • Adam Edwards
  • Pete Burnap
  • Omer Rana

Abstract

A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating demographic data from a sample of more than 113 million Twitter users collected during July 2012. We discuss in detail the methods that can be used for identifying gender and language and illustrate that the proportion of males and females using Twitter in the UK reflects the gender balance observed in the 2011 Census. We also expand on the three types of geographical information that can be derived from Tweets either directly or by proxy and how spatial information can be used to link social media with official curated data. Whilst we make no grand claims about the representative nature of Twitter users in relation to the wider UK population, the derivation of demographic data demonstrates the potential of new social media (NSM) for the social sciences. We consider this paper a clarion call and hope that other researchers test the methods we suggest and develop them further.

Suggested Citation

  • Luke Sloan & Jeffrey Morgan & William Housley & Matthew Williams & Adam Edwards & Pete Burnap & Omer Rana, 2013. "Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 18(3), pages 74-84, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:18:y:2013:i:3:p:74-84
    DOI: 10.5153/sro.3001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.3001
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.5153/sro.3001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Carlo Corradini & Emma Folmer & Anna Rebmann, 2022. "Listening to the buzz: Exploring the link between firm creation and regional innovative atmosphere as reflected by social media," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(2), pages 347-369, March.
    2. P. N. Barbieri & F. Fazio & G. Gamberini, 2015. "Let Young People Join The Legislative Process. A Twitter Based Experiment On Internships," Working Papers wp995, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    3. Tykhonov, Vyacheslav & van Leeuwen, Bas, 2021. "Regional sentiments in Covid tweets in the Netherlands before and during peak infections," MPRA Paper 110879, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Nirmalya Thakur, 2022. "A Large-Scale Dataset of Twitter Chatter about Online Learning during the Current COVID-19 Omicron Wave," Data, MDPI, vol. 7(8), pages 1-16, August.
    5. Steve Kirkwood & Viviene Cree & Daniel Winterstein & Alex Nuttgens & Jenni Sneddon, 2018. "Encountering #Feminism on Twitter: Reflections on a Research Collaboration between Social Scientists and Computer Scientists," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 23(4), pages 763-779, December.
    6. Dilek Yildiz & Jo Munson & Agnese Vitali & Ramine Tinati & Jennifer A. Holland, 2017. "Using Twitter data for demographic research," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 37(46), pages 1477-1514.
    7. Paul Chappell & Mike Tse & Minhao Zhang & Susan Moore, 2017. "Using GPS Geo-tagged Social Media Data and Geodemographics to Investigate Social Differences: A Twitter Pilot Study," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 22(3), pages 38-56, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:18:y:2013:i:3:p:74-84. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.