Gender and Health Information Uptake on Social Media

Opportunity Description:

This interdisciplinary project utilizes social media data to examine how gendered language influences the dissemination and adoption of health information. Working with scholars across campus, this opportunity allows an enterprising student to utilize a range of potential digital research methods, including, but not limited to, sentiment analysis, cascade modeling, lexical diffusion tracking, social listening, and qualitative techniques.

Primary Responsibilities: 

This interdisciplinary project utilizes social media data to examine how gendered language influences the dissemination and adoption of health information. Working with scholars across campus, this opportunity allows an enterprising student to utilize a range of potential digital research methods, including, but not limited to, sentiment analysis, cascade modeling, lexical diffusion tracking, social listening, and qualitative techniques.
This opportunity is aimed at being a holistic experience, where the student will be central in the computational and analytic aspects of the project. Depending on the pace of the project, the student may have the opportunity to present findings at regional or national conferences, be a part of grant writing and preparing articles for publication.

Minimum Qualifications and/or Eligibility Requirements: 

Experience utilizing R, including coding and running functions (ex., statistical tests, tabulations)
Experience using social media data
Familiarity with Reddit and how digital communities and subreddits operate.
Familiarity with some quantitative and qualitative analytical methods.

Familiarity with research related to gender and health, especially men's health.
Experience with large data sets.

Knowledge or skills gained from the experience: 

Students will learn and develop a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods, particularly seminal non-participant methods in digital human subjects research.
Depending on timing, need, and interest, students can learn skills related to literature reviews, writing articles, developing and deliveries research presentations at conferences, grant writing, and developing experimental protocols based on the preliminary results.

Application Requirements: