The MAD Science Lab Mission
The Media and Data Science Lab is a state-of-the-art media analytics and data science lab designed for conducting cutting-edge industry and academic research in the ever-evolving digital media ecosystem. Collaborating with corporate and governmental partners, the MAD Science Lab combines communication expertise with advanced data analytics to provide practical insights into contemporary issues. The MAD Science Lab is housed in the Institute for Communication & Information Research of the College of Communication & Information Science at the University of Alabama at 470 Reese Phifer Hall.
Powered by Sprinklr, the lab leverages is vast digital and social media data collection and analysis capabilities to analyze how social network structures and information flows impact communication outcomes across social networking sites, blogs, discussion forums, product review sites, and news sites. The MAD Science Lab’s mission includes four primary objectives:
- Become a hub for media and data science research for industry and academia
- Serve as incubator for the development of novel analytical and theoretical approaches to “big data” research
- Train communication data scientists equipped with high demand data analytical skills and an understanding of communication processes
- Provide professional clients top-notch monitoring and advanced analysis services
Lab Hours:
Mondays: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Tuesdays: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Thursdays: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Fridays: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Lab hours on Friday will be group trainings when requested. Sprinklr trainings will take place from 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. Leximancer and LIWC trainings will be held from 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Trainings & Requests
C&IS faculty, students, and staff can request training or lab access by completing a MAD Science Request.
While lab hours are open, appointments are strongly recommended to ensure availability of lab personnel, equipment and software.
For all other inquiries, please contact us at [New Email Address].
Lab Capabilities
Basic Data Collection
The Public Opinion Lab has access to current and historical social media and comment posts from a variety of sources including Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, discussion forums, news sites, QQ, and various other crawled data. Our team will work with you to identify and collect data necessary to answer your industry and academic research questions.
Audience Monitoring & Analysis
Our team will examine both direct engagement with your brand or organization and indirect conversations about your brand or organization. We will analyze the conversations to understand what key topics matter to your audience, who drives those conversations, and what content characteristics lead to active engagement.
Our Audience Monitoring & Analysis report provides clients actionable insights based on a variety of analyses including:
- Volume of posts
- Sentiment analysis
- Emotion
- Topics of brand conversations
- Audience affinities
- Geographic analysis
- …and more
Market Trend Analysis
The Market Trend Analysis takes a broader view of clients’ market sectors across social media platforms to understand:
- Emerging consumer attitudes and concerns
- Social media strategies and tactics that work and do not work in particular markets
- Communication patterns across different platforms
- Opportunities and threats for brands moving forward
Aggregating information across these analyses, our team will provide clients with a social media SWOT analysis and strategic recommendations for future social media strategies.
Competitive Brand Evaluation
We will conduct a cross-platform examination of how your brand’s perception, audience, and activities stack up against up to three competitors.
Aggregating data from multiple platforms of interest, we will go beyond the basic audience monitoring and analysis to examine the category trends, share-of-voice, volume trends, net sentiment, audience affinities, and geographic coverage against the competition.
Custom Data Collection & Analysis
Customized approaches to data collection and analysis can be design for specific client and partner needs including specialized data scraping, social network analysis, data mining, machine learning and more. We work with the client to understand the questions they want answered and devise custom data solutions to fit the project’s needs.
The MAD Scientists
Dr. Jameson Hayes
Director
hayes@apr.ua.edu
Jameson Hayes (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is the Director of the Public Opinion Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations. Dr. Hayes’ research specialization is emerging media marketing communication and social media analytics, specifically examining the intersection of brand and interpersonal communication within emerging media and the resulting implications for advertising/marketing communication theory and practice.
Dr. Brian Britt
Associate Director, Data Analytics
britt@apr.ua.edu
Brian Britt(Ph.D., Purdue University) is the Associate Director of Data Analytics for the Public Opinion Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations. Dr. Britt’s research primarily focuses on the intersection between organizational communication and new media, with a particular emphasis on the strategies employed by individuals positioning themselves in online organizations and the ways in which those organizations evolve over time. As a computational social scientist, Dr. Britt connects large-scale data collection and management approaches with innovative statistical analyses in order to address social scientific problems and contexts that would otherwise be intractable.
Dr. Rebecca Britt
Associate Dean of Research
rkbritt@ua.edu
Dr. Rebecca Britt (Ph.D., Purdue University) conducts research examining health communication and the role of new media. She examines large web data sets to understand health discourse and structural and temporal features in online communities. Other projects include studies of social media influencers, online video game subcultures and social dynamics. Dr. Britt enjoys working in the Public Opinion Lab to collaborate on studies that involve gathering data using Twitter and Reddit and has an interest in examining conversations about brands surrounding social media influencers (such as in the beauty, fashion and lifestyle), communication about stigmatized health issues and disparities in health, among many other ideas!
Affiliated Faculty
Dr. Elliot Panek
He studies the uses and effects of digital media from sociological and psychological perspectives. He has published research in top-tier academic journals on the topics of social media and narcissism, texting while driving, media addiction, and media use and political polarization. In 2015, Dr. Panek founded the Alabama Reddit Research Group (ARRG), a research team at the University of Alabama dedicated to improving our understanding of the social dynamics and impact of Reddit.
Dr. Gregory Bott
Gregory J. Bott, CISSP, holds the Marilyn Hewson Chair Professor of Cyber Security in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science at the University of Alabama. He is also a Cyber Nexus Distinguished Fellow and his primary research areas are cybersecurity, human trafficking, and information privacy. He has published in the Productions and Operations Management Journal, the Journal for Management Information Systems, Computers and Security, and Communications of the AIS, and several academic conferences.
Dr. Matthew VanDyke
Matthew S. VanDyke (Ph.D., Texas Tech University) is an assistant professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at The University of Alabama. His research examines processes, effects, and problems associated with the public communication of science and environmental risk information. Most often his projects seek to understand how organizations communicate about science and environmental risks, and the effects of science/environmental risk communication strategies on audiences.
Jay Waters
He is a senior instructor at the University of Alabama in the Advertising and Public Relations Department, teaching classes in media, strategic thinking, and agency management. This is his seventh year at the University of Alabama. Jay joined the A+PR Department full-time in the fall of 2015 after 24 years with Luckie and Company, a full‐service advertising agency headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
Dr. Kenon A. Brown
Kenon A. Brown (Ph.D., The Univ. of Alabama, 2012) is an associate professor and director of online programs for the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at The University of Alabama. He is also the programming director for the Alabama Program in Sports Communication, responsible for stakeholder communications and event planning for the program. Prior to his academic appointment, Kenon worked for eight years in restaurant management and marketing.
Affiliated Graduate students
Yang “Josie” Zhou
Yang “Josie” Zhou (M.A., Boston University) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama in the College of Communication and Information Sciences. Her research focuses on advertising and specifically the intertwined relationships between brands, consumers, and influencers in the social media environment.
She collaborated with Drs. Holiday and Hayes on a paper “Consumer-brand engagement and social media influencers: A discrete emotion perspective on influencer marketing strategy using facial expression and linguistic analysis” winning the 2022 Best Paper at ICORIA.
Bahareh Amini
She is a doctoral student specializing in the advertising with a focus on intersection of human-AI interaction and health advertising. As a graduate administrative assistant in Communication college at the University of Alabama, she contributes to lab by training and assisting both students and faculty in the collection and analysis of social media data.
Amy Ritchart
Amy Ritchart (M.F.A. Murray State University, M.A. Bowling Green State University) is a doctoral student at The University of Alabama in the College of Communication & Information Sciences. Her research program is focused on developing a nuanced understanding of how the media shapes and aids in public understanding of discourse and policy on issues related to politics and health. She uses a variety of research methods, including quantitative, qualitative, and computational.
Suyu Chou
Suyu Chou is a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media. Her research interests lie in the intersection of public anxiety on social media, risk perception, and crisis management. Her current studies include observing the dynamics on subreddit related to losing weight topics during Covid-19, and influencers’ crisis management related to how they interact with people online and their image repair strategies
Khadiza Tul Jannat
Khadiza Tul Jannat is a third-year doctoral student in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama, specializing in health and organizational communication, and public health. Jannat completed M.A. in Communication Studies at Minnesota State University- Mankato where her thesis examined the connections between doctors’ self-disclosure, gender, and patient satisfaction in doctor-patient interactions.
Yuanwei Lyu
Yuanwei Lyu a Ph.D. Candidate from the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. She received her master’s degree in public relations from Ball State University. Her research is at the heart of emerging media effects on strategic communication. She studies media technology effects in the context of public relations, how the emerging media affect polarization primarily through emotions and sentiment on social media, and how strategic communication plans should be designed to address these issues.
Research
Academic Publications
Title | Author/s | Abstract |
Algorithmic conspirituality: Explicating its emergence, dimensions, and persuasibility | Shaheen Kanthawala, Kelley Cotter, Amy Ritchart, Ankolika De, Haley McAtee, Connie Yun, & Julia DeCook. | Algorithmic conspirituality is the belief that social media algorithms have the capacity to know users intimately and convey personally meaningful messages at the exact right moment to revelatory effect. Through a thematic analysis of TikTok videos, this study explicates this concept by identifying five distinct dimensions of its expression on TikTok—(1) relational, (2) injunctive, (3) personal, (4) spiritual, (5) conspiratorial—and explaining their relationship with the platform’s affordances—(1) connectedness, (2) personalization, and (3) social creativity. We then connect the emergence and impact of this phenomenon to the possibility for persuasion and behavior changes through normalization of messaging in areas such as mental health, smoking, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and body dysmorphia that could lead to positive and negative health outcomes. New Media & Society. |
Taking the lead in misinformation-related conversations in social media networks during a mass shooting crisis | Jiyoung Lee, Brian C. Britt, Shaheen Kanthawala | Misinformation (i.e. information identified as false) spreads widely and quickly on social media – a space where crowds of ordinary citizens can become leading voices – during a crisis when information is in short supply. Using the theoretical lenses of socially curated flow and networked gatekeeping frameworks, we address the following three aims: First, we identify emergent opinion leaders in misinformation-related conversations on social media. Second, we explore distinct groups that contribute to online discourses about misinformation. Lastly, we investigate the actual dominance of misinformation within disparate groups in the early phases of mass shooting crises. Design/methodology/approach This paper used network and cluster analyses of Twitter data that focused on the four most prevalent misinformation themes surrounding the El Paso mass shooting. Findings A total of seven clusters of users emerged, which were classified into five categories: (1) boundary-spanning hubs, (2) broadly popular individuals, (3) reputation-building hubs, (4) locally popular individuals and (5) non-opinion leaders. Additionally, a content analysis of 128 tweets in six clusters, excluding the cluster of non-opinion leaders, further demonstrated that the opinion leaders heavily focused on reiterating and propagating misinformation (102 out of 128 tweets) and collectively made zero corrective tweets. Originality/value These findings expand the intellectual understanding of how various types of opinion leaders can shape the flow of (mis)information in a crisis. Importantly, this study provides new insights into the role of trans-boundary opinion leaders in creating an echo chamber of misinformation by serving as bridges between otherwise fragmented discourses. Internet Research. |
Pro-social framing and sentiment in U.S. broadcast networks’ Instagram posts about the COVID-19 vaccine | Amy, Ritchart; Rebecca, Britt | The study uses health risk frames to conduct 1) a content analysis and 2) a computational sentiment analysis to analyze the framing of the COVID-19 vaccine in Instagram posts by major broadcast news networks during its first year of availability in the United States. The analysis focused on the portrayal of the vaccine as a pro-social solution to the pandemic, with emphasis on the consequences of the pandemic, individual solutions from medical professionals grounded in science, and the vaccine as a preventive measure. Findings from qualitative content analysis (N = 45) included a reduced presence of alarmist, loss, conflict, and economic consequences frames, and the absence of uncertainty, indicating an explanatory framework and support for the vaccine. The computational sentiment analysis (N = 178) revealed a slightly positive and variable sentiment, suggesting an overall affirmative picture of the vaccine in the networks’ Instagram coverage. Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. |
Social Media as Risk-Attenuation and Misinformation-Amplification Station: How Social Media Interaction Affects Misperceptions about COVID-19 | Jiyoung Lee, Jihyang Choi & Rebecca K. Britt | This study addresses how social media interaction affects misperceptions about COVID-19 via risk perceptions thereof and whether political orientation moderates the relationship. Using original two-wave panel survey data (N = 679), this study reveals that social media interaction increases misperception directly, as well as indirectly by reducing the extent of risk perception. The extent of risk perception is found to be a negative predictor of misperception. The deleterious role of social media interaction on misperception is pronounced across groups of conservatives and liberals, but in different ways. Although the effects of social media interaction on the level of misperception are observed in both conservatives and liberals, this relationship is particularly salient among conservatives. Furthermore, whereas conservatives consistently show low levels of risk perception toward COVID-19 regardless of how much they interact with others on social media, the more liberals interact on social media, the less likely they are to perceive COVID-19-related risks. The findings expand our understanding of the role of interaction behaviors on social media in forming risk perceptions and misperceptions on the politicized COVID-19 pandemic. Health Communication. |
Factbait: Emotionality of Fact-Checking Tweets and Users’ Engagement during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and the COVID-19 Pandemic | Jiyoung Lee & Brian C. Britt | Given the importance of fact-checking in reducing the spread of false information on social media, prior research has examined effective fact-checking strategies. The current study addresses this question by conducting a computational analysis of actual fact-checking tweets of three representative fact-checking organizations in the United States (Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes), replies, and retweets (N = 166,526) on Twitter made from September 29 to November 3, 2020, when the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the COVID-19 crisis co-occurred. The results show that fact-checking tweets with a greater degree of anxiety and anger generally receive more replies, but those exhibiting sadness are retweeted less. Additionally, fact-checking tweets with heightened levels of anxiety, anger, sadness, or negativity, in general, tend to elicit replies featuring a degree of anxiety, anger, sadness, or negativity, respectively. Our findings suggest that emotions can be utilized as drivers of engagement in fact-checking tweets, meaning that the emotional impetus can potentially serve as an important strategy to make fact-checking efforts more impactful in uncertain situations. However, fact-checking organizations should be aware that emotional appeals in fact-checking posts catalyze correspondingly emotional responses from their audiences, which reflects the emotional contagion process. Digital Journalism . |
Quantum power iteration to efficiently obtain the dominant eigenvector from diagonalizable nonnegative matrices | Brian C. Britt | This manuscript presents a quantum computing implementation of power iteration for diagonalizable nonnegative matrices that offers a significant speed increase for large matrices, achieving O(Kmax(mi) + N) time complexity for each iteration. The computational approach presented in this manuscript may be directly applied to numerous other algorithms derived from power iteration, ultimately allowing near-term quantum devices to facilitate a broad range of analyses that would otherwise be infeasible. Quantum Information Processing. |
The State of Ehealth Research across Information Technologies: A Longitudinal Analysis Using Topic Modeling to Address Future Scholarship | Rebecca K. Britt, Suyu Chou, Ozioma Omah, Ananya Chakraborty | eHealth research has been marked by the last two decades of scholarship spurred by technological advances and the potential of health promotion and behavior change. The study examined the state of eHealth scholarship across social, behavioral and information technologies through a systematic, machine-based learning approach of the last 19 years across 811 articles. The study analyzes topics that were published using latent Dirichlet allocation of studies from 2002 to 2021; it also raises ethical challenges for researchers related to those in prior health initiatives by the CDC and in current scholarship. Results show the common topics, terms, and linguistic attributes within the state of eHealth scholarship and disparities in other areas based on topics published. Suggestions are offered for interdisciplinary collaboration to facilitate the growth and the optimal, practical use of eHealth and directions for the future. Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. |
Infrastructural and network support in the illness experience: The role of community crowdsourcing in self-care | Rebecca K. Britt, Erin Faith Doss, Meredith Hayes | Social sharing within pseudonymous online communities can assist- or hinder- the self-management of health care and emphasize challenges associated with chronic illness. For those who are affected by chronic illness who participate in a public online community, the breadth of topics discussed in a corpus of a pseudonymous group can lend insight into tracking the interaction processes and outcomes. Examining the topics discussed in the endometriosis subreddit (r/endo) informs public health strategies as well as ethical considerations in health care surrounding stigmatized illness in a public community. In the present study, the data corpus of r/endo was analyzed and scraped, employing computational data mining techniques to uncover the discursive practices within the community. The topics of self-management is constructed by diagnosed and undiagnosed patients; endometriosis etiology and understanding symptoms negotiated within the community. In an online community for those who face unique health challenges from endometriosis, we argue that users engage in a form of community crowdsourcing via information exchange and network support, spurred by the platform affordances of Reddit. Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. |
Megathreads and ‘waifu wars’: A structural content analysis of r/persona5 as a community of practice | Rebecca K. Britt & PS Berge | Communities of practice dedicated to video game fandoms are not uncommon, and extant literature has examined how video game media continues to emerge in global popularity. The current study examines the dominant discourse within a community dedicated to the game Persona 5, which has expanded beyond its initial niche into a larger transmedia phenomenon. In this study, we excavate the Persona 5 Reddit fandom to identify and extract themes within the group conversations to better understand how niche games and fandoms navigate growth into the larger mainstream. Methodologically, the full data corpus was extracted and analyzed using a computational content analysis. Our findings revealed that discourse was structured through three levels: moderation in the community, gameplay, and fandom surrounding the game. We suggest implications for future research, such as understanding contemporary fandoms through COPs and digital spaces, and acknowledging the dominant role of community infrastructure and metatextual discourse in fandom spaces. Participations – Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. |
Japan’s digital diaspora: social capital, health, and public communication in r/japanlife | Rebecca K. Britt & Katharina Barkley | The present study examines the communication of members in an online community designed for both native and foreign residents living in Japan. The community serves as a platform for members to discuss various topics related to lifestyle, health, food, fashion, among other topics. Using a topic model, we analyzed a mid-size sample (n = 150k) to identify the primary topics of discussion and the potential benefits of participation. The findings indicate that health, lifestyle, travel within and outside of Japan, financial and domestic advice seeking, and temporal discussions for foreigners were the main themes discussed. We discuss the implications of these results and suggest future research directions, such as exploring sensitive topics among Japanese residents and examining the role of mediated communication in society. Japan Forum. |
Trends and challenges within Reddit and health communication research: A systematic review | Rebecca K Britt, Courtny L Franco, & Naiyan Jones | There is a growing body of health communication literature addressing health-related discourse across user-generated platforms. Specifically, Reddit, the 19th most visited website in the world, serves as a promising venue for understanding communication surrounding health concerns. Such studies apply a variety of theories and methodological approaches, analyze large corpora, and build predictive and descriptive models for public health communication. The current study investigates health communication literature in the context of Reddit, identifying major topics, theories, and methods employed across studies, as well as how health communication topics have evolved over time. We identify future research directions, proposing theoretical and methodological considerations as well as issues and practices to employ when researching health phenomena via social platforms. Communication and the Public. |
Communication Expressed on the COVID-19 Subreddit in the Midst of a Global Pandemic | Rebecca K. Britt, Brian C. Britt, Elliot Panek & Jiyoung Lee | The manner in which scientific information related to the COVID-19 pandemic has been shared and discussed in similar venues has, to date, been largely neglected. Considering the role that such discourse plays in knowledge sharing and knowledge production, it is essential to understand such communication processes as they relate to global health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study examines communication expressed by participants in the r/COVID19 subreddit, a community that facilitates scientific discussion of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. A computational content analysis was performed to identify the primary themes of users’ communication on r/COVID19, while stepwise segmented regression was used to assess identify longitudinal changes in the volume of user contributions. Findings showed that while conversations were centered on scientific conversations, they were catalyzed by sociological and political developments rather than scientific breakthroughs. Future studies should examine the effects of pandemic-related communities on lurkers, the effects of visibility on scientific and medical contributions, and the implications of pseudonymity and ambiguous credentials in a community addressing a volatile health and scientific topic. Health Communication. |
Beyond reputational and financial damage: Examining emotional and religious harm in a post-crisis case study of Hillsong Church | Jordan Morehouse, Laura L. Lemon | Religious organizations have largely been overlooked in public relations scholarship, particularly in the crisis communication literature. Additionally, research in crisis communication primarily focuses on the reputational, material, and financial damage caused by crises. This study addresses theoretical and topical gaps in public relations scholarship by advancing Spaulding’s (2018) emotional and religious harm categories for moral crises within religious organizations. Results of a qualitative case study of Hillsong Church’s Carl Lentz crisis suggest an emotional harm continuum exists for moral crises, and religious harm emerges as distancing as a religious protective measure. Findings advance crisis communication theory regarding the use of religious and renewal rhetoric and types of harm inflicted from crises, and assists practitioners in crafting post-crisis messages that prioritize stakeholder healing and the organization’s recovery. Public Relations Review. |
A Multimodal Emotion Perspective on Social Media Influencer Marketing: The Effectiveness of Influencer Emotions, Network Size, and Branding on Consumer Brand Engagement Using Facial Expression and Linguistic Analysis | Steven J. Holiday, Jameson L. Hayes, Haseon Park, Yuanwei Lyu, & Yang ” Josie” Zhou | Social media influencers rely on emotional connection to maintain and grow their followings and have value for brands. To date, however, no research has quantitatively examined the impact of emotion in the facial expressions and caption text that influencers use in their video posts on consumer engagement through likes, comments, and views of posts. Grounded in consumer brand engagement, psychological sense of community, and the behavior ecology view of facial displays, this study uses social media analytics, facial expression analysis, and computational linguistic analysis to assess the emotional substance of 402 video posts by prominent micro-, macro-, and mega-influencer mothers, known as InstaMoms, as exemplars of Instagram influencers. The study identifies that the amount of emotion used and specific discrete emotions have a meaningful influence on engagement, and both follower count and presence of branding saliently contribute to a more robust understanding of the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications are identified and discussed. This study was published in Journal of Interactive Marketing. |
Can Social Media Listening Platforms’ Artificial Intelligence Be Trusted? Examining the Accuracy of Crimson Hexagon’s (Now Brandwatch Consumer Research’s) AI-Driven Analyses | Jameson L. Hayes, Brian C. Britt, William Evans, Stephen W. Rush, Nathan A. Towery, Alyssa C. Adamson | Practitioners and scholars increasingly employ social media listening platforms (SMLPs) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to extract actionable insights from large amounts of social media data informing research questions and brand strategy. Due to their proprietary nature, AI tools within SMLPs are “black boxes” that force users to accept results on blind faith, a source of concern in industry and academia. This study seeks to provide greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of SMLPs by assessing the AI-based results of leading SMLP Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch Consumer Research) against those of a standard human content analysis and an analysis conducted using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). This study was published in The Journal of Advertising, |
Using targeted betweenness centrality to identify bridges to neglected users in the Twitter conversation on veteran suicide | Brian C. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, Aibek Musaev, Pezhman Sheinidashtegol, Scott Parrott, avid L. Albright | There are many real-world contexts in which it would be invaluable to identify intermediaries who serve as bridges for specified dyads. For instance, with respect to suicide prevention among military veterans, mental health organizations play an important role in providing information, social support, and other resources to veterans, particularly on social media, where anonymous and pseudonymous interactions may help to counteract the stigma associated with suicide and mental health. However, many at-risk individuals are overlooked in the large-scale conversations on social media and are thus less likely to benefit from those interactions. Intermediaries who can integrate those peripheral actors into the conversation, or at least deliver essential information to them, could help to resolve this issue. The critical question, then, is how to identify those potentially useful intermediaries who are well positioned to act as bridges to reach peripheral actors. To address this challenge, we propose a new network measure, targeted betweenness centrality, to identify vertices that represent potentially useful intermediaries between specified dyads, then use that measure to identify social media users who can act as opinion leaders on behalf of the US Department of Veterans Affairs to reach vertices on the periphery of the Twitter conversation about veteran suicide. The results of this study provide useful insights related to opinion leadership, the military veteran community, and suicide prevention, and more broadly, they demonstrate the practical utility of targeted betweenness centrality for real-world research across a variety of contexts. Published in Social Network Mining & Analysis. |
Prevalence of anger, engaged in sadness: engagement in misinformation, correction, and emotional tweets during mass shootings | Jiyoung Lee, Shaheen Kanthawala, Brian C. Britt, Danielle F. Deavours, Tanya Ott-Fulmore | The pervasive anger-laden tweets about mass shooting incidents might contribute to hostile narratives and eventually reignite political polarization. The notable presence of anger in correction tweets further suggests that those who are trying to provide correction to misinformation also rely on emotion. Moreover, our study suggests that displays of sadness could function in a way that leads individuals to rely on false claims as a coping strategy to counteract uncertainty. Publish in Online Information Review. |
Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities: A Computational Content Analysis of the r/Dentistry Subreddit | Brian C. Britt, Rebecca K. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, Eliot T. Panek, Jessica Maddox, Aibek Musaev | The study explores communication expressed by participants in a subreddit surrounding oral health care, moderated by dentists and dental hygienists. The corpus was analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted program used for computational content analyses of large data sets. Users’ personal disclosures about ongoing dental concerns, advice about others’ self-care, and the role of interpersonal communication with and among health care providers emerged as dominant themes. The findings suggest that online communities may serve an important role that dentists are unable to fill in their limited interactions with individual patients. Such interaction spaces may therefore offer a fertile environment for future interventions to promote beneficial practices and achieve positive health-related outcomes. Publish in Health Communication. |
Social TV and the WWE: Exploring the fan-to-brand relationship in a highly engaged, live-viewing, interactive online space | Stephen McCreery, Brian C. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes | Social television (TV) engagement has become more commonplace as viewers seek alternative ways of engaging with TV shows and other viewers. This is especially true with televised professional wrestling; 119,506 tweets were analyzed using social network analysis during the four World Wrestling Entertainment telecasts. Results show that brand-affiliated users primarily interact among one another and not the fans themselves, despite fans reaching out to the brand, resulting in significant social stratification and low interactivity within the community. The findings suggest that when fans think they are able to join and contribute to the brand’s ongoing conversation, those fans might still be highly motivated to communicate with the brand, even if the brand does not reciprocate. Published in Convergence. |
Continuing a Community of Practice Beyond the Death of its Domain | Brian C. Britt, Rebecca K. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, Jeyoung Oh | In this study, which was published in Behaviour & Information Technology, our team examined a longstanding online community of practice developed around the Tales of Link mobile game to discern how its members responded when the mobile game itself was shut down. This study demonstrated potential avenues to sustain a community of practice whose domain has been terminated, such as substituting an analogous domain or converting the group to a community of interest, as well as potential pitfalls in attempts to do so. |
What Inspired That Tweet: A Comparative Analysis of Official and Stakeholder-Enacted Crisis Responses During the Urban Meyer/Zach Smith Scandal | Natalie Brown-Devlin, Kenon A. Brown, Brian C. Britt, Alyssa Adamson | This study investigated the relationship between stakeholder enacted crisis communication and organizational crisis response. Through textual analysis, the reputation repair strategies that head coach Urban Meyer utilized in his four public statements regarding the Zach Smith scandal were identified. Next, 10,000 tweets from Ohio-based stakeholders were content analyzed to examine the extent to which stakeholders mirror the selected strategies employed by an individual enveloped in a crisis and amplify them through their own social media networks. Results showed that stakeholders engaged in three primary behaviors: rallying together by using the ingratiation and reminder strategies; mirroring some of Meyer’s official strategies; and utilizing their own strategies to attribute blame to other, external parties. Implications regarding how stakeholders utilize Twitter, itself, during a crisis were also proffered. Published in Communication & Sport. |
From #endthestigma to #realman: Stigma-Challenging Social Media Responses to NBA Players’ Mental Health Disclosures | Scott Parrot, Andrew C. Billings, Samuel D. Hakim, Patrick Gentile | A number of professional athletes have used social media to disclose personal experience with mental illness, including NBA All-Stars DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love in 2018. The disclosures could serve to challenge the stigmatization of mental illness, given the positive social standing of professional athletes and the potential power of parasocial relationships in health promotion and behavior. The present study quantitatively examined 3,366 fan responses to the mental health disclosures of both athletes, unpacking the extent to which fan commentary perpetuated or challenged the stigmatization of depression and anxiety. Fans provided overwhelmingly positive response to the athletes’ mental health disclosures, creating a normative environment in which disclosure translated into acceptance rather than rejection. While more frequently offering messages of advice and strength to DeRozan, fans were more likely to offer messages of encouragement and personal experiences with mental illness to Love. Published in Communication Reports. |
From Waifus to Whales | Brian C. Britt, Rebecca K. Britt | We assessed the manifestation of discussions in an online community of practice based around a popular mobile game, Fate/Grand Order, as well as the evolution of those conversations over time. This study which was published in Mobile Media & Communication, showcased the manner in which online communities of practice evolve as its members ascend toward mastery of the practice that they jointly explore. |
Social Media and Suicide | Scott Parrott, Brian C. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, David L. Albright | The present study collected and validated suicide-related terms from the U.S. English language in 2018–2019. By validating clinical and lay terms with people on the front lines of suicide prevention, the study provides a necessary foundation for lexical analyses of suicide communication on social media. This study was published in the Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work. |
Presidential and Gubernatorial Tweets Involving Military Servicemembers and Veterans | Nicholas R. Eckhart, Kirsten Laha-Walsh, Scott Parrott, David L. Albright | The military consistently ranks as one of the most highly favorable occupations in the United States (US). However, fewer and fewer people have contact with military veterans than in the past, a trend that is expected to continue. Since military veterans carry such high levels of favorability but continue to lose contact with society, a content analysis of 1,976 tweets from former president Donald Trump and US governors was conducted to understand how military veterans were represented in the political arena on Twitter. Tweets were pulled between January 20, 2017 and November 26, 2019. Results indicated nearly all tweets about military veterans were positive and that Republicans tweeted twice as often about veterans as Democrats did. The topics of the tweets were mostly heroism (50.8%) followed by legislative or political agendas (45.5%). Republicans also provided more quotes from veterans than Democrats did, but Republicans did not use that contact to reduce stigma surrounding mental health. Published in Journal of Veterans Studies. |
Enhancing Trustworthiness of Qualitative Findings | Laura L. Lemon, Jameson L. Hayes | Our study offers an approach to enhancing trustworthiness of qualitative findings through data analysis triangulation using Leximancer, a text mining software that uses co-occurrence to conduct semantic and relational analyses of text corpuses to identify concepts, themes, and how they relate to one another. The Leximancer analysis provided missing nuance from the a priori model, depicting the value of and connection between emergent themes. This study was published in the The Quality Report. |
The Cause Effect | Steven Holiday, Jameson L. Hayes, Brian C. Britt, Yuanwei Lyu | This study addressed the effect of corporate social responsibility on long-term cause engagement—specifically, whether individuals who participated in the Mean Stinks anti-bullying campaign remained engaged with the cause after the campaign ended. This analysis, which was published in the International Journal of Advertising, demonstrated the potential for campaigns to attract newcomers to the cause as well as the risk of disenfranchising those who were already committed to the cause. |
Too Big to Sell? | Rebecca K. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, Brian C. Britt, Haseon Park | Our team examined the roles that mega influencers and micro influencers play in social media conversations about the beauty and fashion industry. This article, which was published in the Journal of Interactive Advertising, indicated that influencer posts using affective language elicit less engagement, a negative effect that is especially severe among micro influencers, thus contradicting the popular assumption that micro influencers can best fill unique roles by engaging in intimate, emotion-laden interactions with their followers. |
Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities | Brian C. Britt, Rebecca K. Britt, Jameson L. Hayes, Elliot T. Panek, Jessica Maddox, Aibek Musaev | We used Leximancer to analyze the evolving structure of conversations about oral healthcare on the r/Dentistry subreddit. This study, which was published in Health Communication, showed how online communities may supplement traditional interactions between patients and health care providers, satisfying healthcare needs that patient-provider communication alone does not address. |
Industry Research
A Competitive Analysis of the Birmingham Television Market
Our team conducted a competitive social media analysis of audience engagement with broadcast television news stations in the Birmingham market identifying content tendencies, audience profiles, and influencers for each station. Actionable insights into content strategies and delivery tactics were derived from analyses.
#BamaBlitz- Social Funding Raising Analysis
#BamaBlitz is an annual, one-day giving campaign that the University of Alabama employs to drive gifts in support of identified student passion projects across campus. Our team used custom data analytics approaches to identify key influencers for reach and engagement, generate a list of leads, and optimize messaging for upcoming campaigns.
Training Resources
The Public Opinion Lab features a variety of resources enabling high-impact social media and computational research. Sprinklr and CrowdTangle are social media listening and monitoring platforms that also serve as vast social media libraries for research purposes. Leximancer and LIWC are commercial solutions available to researchers for computational analysis of extensive text data.
The video tutorials below, along with the Useful Links, provide introductory training and documentation for lab software.
Connect with Us
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