Evaluating the representativeness in the geographic distribution of twitter user population

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Twitter data are becoming a Big Data stream and have drawn multidisciplinary interests to study population characteristics and social problems that cannot be measured well by traditional surveys. However, the use of Twitter data has been strongly resisted because of concerns about the representativeness of the population as we know little about the demographic characters of the users. It is critical to evaluate the extent to which Twitter users represent the population across different demographic groups. This study evaluates the representativeness and examines the geographic distributions of Twitter user population and its correspondence to the real population. By estimating Twitter user demographics for the contiguous U.S. in 2014, the preliminary results revealed both over- and under-representation of certain demographic groups against the real population at county-level. A representation index is used to assess the representativeness of Twitter samples geographically, which may help further studies to identify the determinants of biases.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2018
EditorsChristopher B. Jones, Ross S. Purves
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450360340
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 6 2018
Event12th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2018 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Nov 6 2018 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2018

Conference

Conference12th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period11/6/18 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Geography, Planning and Development
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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