Kmetty Zoltán és Koltai Júlia részvétele a BigSurv18 konferencián

Koltai Júlia [adjunktus, Társadalomkutatások Módszertana Tanszék] és Kmetty Zoltán [adjunktus, Szociológia Tanszék]  részt vettek a BigSurv18 konferencián Barcelonában. Egy poszteren mutatták be Bozsonyi Károllyal közös kutatásukat. A depressziónak és az öngyilkosságnak a közösségi oldalakon való megjelenését vizsgálták.

Absztrakt:

Old Problems, New Approaches: The Appearance of Suicide and Depression in the Online Social Media – A Study of Instagram
Dr Júlia Koltai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Dr Zoltán Kmetty (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) - Presenting Author
Dr Károly Bozsonyi (Károli Gáspár University, Budapest)
"The research of suicide in social sciences goes back to Durkeheim’s famous book, and the scientific interest in the phenomenon has not declined from then. The increasing suicide ratio in some of the developed countries, like the US, makes this topic even more important. There is specialized literature on the explanation of the different spatial and temporal trends of committed suicide. It is a well-known phenomenon in suicide research that the incidents of suicide follow a clear seasonal pattern. There are minor differences between countries, but the main trend is that the ratio of suicides is high in the spring and summer, and low in the winter. There is also a strong weekly pattern: the risk of suicide is high on Mondays and much lower on the weekends. 
In the recent few years, many studies were published about how suicide can be studied using Big Data and Social Media Data. But only few studies focused on the spatial and temporal appearance of suicide in the digital data.  
In our paper we try to work on this research gap, and answer the following question: Is it possible that a general negative social climate exists, which, on the one hand, manifests itself in the number of suicides committed, and on the other hand, appears in the content of post, messages and hashtags in social media? 
In our analysis, we will focus on the time-trends of suicide related expressions and compare them with the well-researched and well-documented time-trends of committed suicide. Necessarily we do not suppose that the people who commit suicide are the same people who show negative emotions on social media, we only hypothesise that there is a general social and emotional climate that changes in space and time. This climate affects both social media posts and comments and the number of commited suicides. Therefore, we do not think that the correlation between the two phenomena implies a cause and effect relationship, but we applied a causality-scheme, in which there is a common cause of the emotions that appear in the social media data and also on the number of suicides. 
To make sure that the observed trends are not just the trends of social network activity, we will normalize our data with the estimated activity of the online social network for the examined period. We will use Instagram data of a given time period for the analysis focusing on English language posts and hashtags."

Poszter: 

2018.10.29.