By pulling tweets from the Twitter Platform, we can gauge the real-time sentiment of individuals on a wide scale. As compared to previously-used methodologies for quantifying sentiment, “the explosion in the amount and availability of data relating to social media in the past 10 years has driven a rapid increase in the application of data-driven techniques to the social sciences and sentiment analysis of large-scale populations.” [1]. Leveraging social media, specifically the Twitter platform, researchers can more accurately attempt to gauge the happiness of the population. Analyzing the sentiment of Twitter Users through their tweets can provide additional insight, and avoid a need to rely on surveys that may incidentally introduce survey response bias or may only capture the sentiment of individuals in a specific point in time.
“Consistent with life satisfaction research in psychology terms … we identify, through passive surveillance, tweeters expressing life satisfaction or dissatisfaction via their tweets. ” [2]. As life satisfaction represents as an important component of well-being and happiness, researchers chose Twitter to investigate the life satisfaction as people freely express both their positive and negative emotions on social media. Satisfied users express happiness and show positive trends on their features while the unsatisfied users express unhappiness and negative emotions. By analyzing these emotional expressions posted by Twitter Users for their true sentiment, can predictions be made about the overall happiness of the population? More broadly, is there a relationship between tweet content and population happiness?
