Padmini Srinivasan, PhD, Professor

Department of Computer Science

May 1, 2015

“From Traditional Surveys to Social Media Surveillance, A Case Study of Life Satisfaction”

Biosketch: Padmini Srinivasan is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Computer Science department at the University of Iowa. She joined the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor in 1989. Prior to that she was a professor at George Mason University. She received her doctorate from Syracuse University in 1985.

Abstract: Social media surveillance is becoming increasingly popular. It is being used to explore various topics such as political sentiment, product satisfaction, flu trends, and health beliefs. However, these surveillance methods are typically disconnected from any existing survey tools addressing the same or similar goals. The research question we address is: how does one develop a surveillance strategy from a survey of interest? We propose a general methodology for doing this and demonstrate its application to the study of life satisfaction, an area of interest in psychology and health (depression and well-being research). In essence we use our methodology to derive a Twitter surveillance strategy from the well-reputed and extensively used Satisfaction With Life Scale developed by Diener in the 1980s. We suggest that our methodology may be applied to other surveys of interest especially those that are in the form of scales. The advantage is that social media surveillance strategies can then be designed in a principled manner from theoretically motivated and established methods for collecting observations from people.

In this talk we present our methodology for deriving a Twitter surveillance strategy from a survey of interest. We also present our observations regarding life satisfaction gathered by surveillance of a two-year Twitter stream. In particular we present observed associations between life satisfaction expressions and psychosocial variables.

This research is part of Chao Yang’s PhD thesis with Padmini Srinivasan as supervisor.