Opinion data on a platter

Twitter data for research

Joseph Allen, a Research Associate at the UKDS, discusses why we use Twitter data for research.

When we try to analyse an individual we have access to a snapshot of who this person is. We could collect quantitative data on ages, sex, family details, salary and beyond. While these data points are valuable, they only capture a part of an individuals’ complicated history and limitless potential.

Photo by Solen Feyissa from Pexels

Beyond this, we make a few assumptions:

• That our data is recent enough to affect upcoming policy.
• Our individuals told the truth, to us and themselves. Pessimists might downplay the impact of a diet. Many of us would overstate the amount of exercise we do.
• Events outside our dataset are insignificant. An Individual may have hidden traumas or pressures steering their reported behaviour.

Imagine an individual reporting a salary of £25,000. This might imply that they are early in their career, climbing in salary with each job change. Or, this could be the salary of somebody tired of a corporate career retraining as a teacher.

With traditional Machine Learning, these attributes may have implied connections. We could predict…