Using Social Media Data to Measure and Influence Community Well-Being

Information about our local environment is everywhere on the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT), especially in certain forms of social media. Our engagement and interaction with this information in our daily social lives, as individuals and groups, has grown tremendously in the past decade and continues to do so. This is an early research proposal that aims at looking beyond detection of events in the “real-world” via social media and wants to ask how we can gauge from the social media data how well individuals and groups of community-based individuals are doing. My goal is to do this by finding useful measures of social indicators, in particular community well-being and its possible relationship with the collective stress and/or tranquility of communities, in social media. Moreover, I would like to see if we can influence individuals and groups through their social networks in order to change or modify their behavior on the basis of this data. This research, then, seeks to engage in the fields of social media use, the evaluation of community well-being, and the mechanisms of influence in social networks. This project is important in helping us better understand how social media plays a role in communities and how we might increase the utility of this ubiquitous and very popular online technology.