Background
Educators are increasingly turning to Twitter for their professional development (PD) needs (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Greenhalgh & Koehler, 2017; Stevens, 2014). The purpose of this content analysis study was to explore how emotions and wellbeing are reflected in a social media PD community for educators.
Hypotheses/Research Questions
User generated data in social networking sites transmit expressed emotions through posts. These emotions are broadcast throughout the social network through the means defined in social network theory (Granovetter, 1973) and carried infectiously throughout the network via emotional contagion (Hatfield, 2014). The wellbeing of users who read and interact with these emotion-laden posts may be affected.
RQ 1: What is the emotional sentiment of posts in a social media PD community for educators?
RQ 2: How is wellbeing represented in posts in a social media PD community for educators?
Sample Characteristics and Sample Size
‘Participants’ for this study were 2,221 de-identified public social media posts from a professional development community on Twitter.
Design
Tweets from #edchat were downloaded over the course of a week, cleaned, and analyzed. Tweets were analyzed against publicly available lexicons especially designed to gain information about emotions, sentiment, and wellbeing in text data.
Results
The key findings for question 1 were that positive emotions flowed through the network over negative emotions. The top occurring emotions were “anticipation,” “trust,” and “surprise.” For research question 2, positive instances of wellbeing elements flowed through the network over their negative counterparts. The top occurring elements were “engagement” and “meaning.”
Scientific Contribution
This study demonstrated that emotions and wellbeing elements may be found in Twitter data through the use of research-based lexicons. Results serve as an impetus for educators, policy makers, and instructional designers to learn how to best use the power and virality of social media for educational and PD purposes.