Talking about Climate Change and Global Warming
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 29 September 2015
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 10 (9), e0138996
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138996
Abstract
The increasing prevalence of social networks provides researchers greater opportunities to evaluate and assess changes in public opinion and public sentiment towards issues of social consequence. Using trend and sentiment analysis is one method whereby researchers can identify changes in public perception that can be used to enhance the development of a social consciousness towards a specific public interest. The following study assessed Relative search volume (RSV) patterns for global warming (GW) and Climate change (CC) to determine public knowledge and awareness of these terms. In conjunction with this, the researchers looked at the sentiment connected to these terms in social media networks. It was found that there was a relationship between the awareness of the information and the amount of publicity generated around the terminology. Furthermore, the primary driver for the increase in awareness was an increase in publicity in either a positive or a negative light. Sentiment analysis further confirmed that the primary emotive connections to the words were derived from the original context in which the word was framed. Thus having awareness or knowledge of a topic is strongly related to its public exposure in the media, and the emotional context of this relationship is dependent on the context in which the relationship was originally established. This has value in fields like conservation, law enforcement, or other fields where the practice can and often does have two very strong emotive responses based on the context of the problems being examined.Keywords
This publication has 38 references indexed in Scilit:
- Googling Trends in Conservation BiologyConservation Biology, 2013
- Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific ImpactJournal of Medical Internet Research, 2011
- The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. during the Influenza A H1N1 PandemicPLOS ONE, 2011
- Classifying disease outbreak reports using n-grams and semantic featuresInternational Journal of Medical Informatics, 2009
- Surveying Colorado Band Directors’ Opinions of Skills and Characteristics Important to Successful Music TeachingJournal of Research in Music Education, 2009
- Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directionsWires Climate Change, 2009
- Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and ValuesClimatic Change, 2006
- Reality mining: sensing complex social systemsPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2005
- The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.American Psychologist, 2001
- Understanding Attitudes Toward Progressive TaxationPublic Opinion Quarterly, 1994