4 - Hyperlocal Happiness from Tweets

Summary

It has been hypothesized that the language of Twitter users is associated with the socioeconomic well-being those users experience in their physical com- munities (e.g., satisfaction with life in their states of residence). To test the relationship between language use and psychological experience, researchers textually processed tweets to extract mainly sentiment and subject matters (topics) and associated those two quantities with census indicators of well-being. They did so by focusing on geographically coarse-grained communities, the finest-grained of which were U.S. census areas. After briefly introducing those studies and describing the common steps they generally take, we offer a case study taken from our own work on geographically smaller communities: London census areas.

Introduction

Happiness has often been indirectly characterized by readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP). Yet in recent years, policy makers have tried to change that and introduced indicators that go beyond merely economic considerations. In 2010, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy intended to include well-being in France's measurement of economic progress (Stratton, 2010). The UK prime minister David Cameron has been initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to make society stronger by getting more people running their own affairs locally all together. The idea shared by many governments all over the world is to explore new ways of measuring community well-being and, as such, put forward policies that promote more quality of life (happiness) rather than material welfare (GDP).

Measuring the well-being of single individuals can be successfully accomplished by administering questionnaires such as the Satisfaction with Life (SWL) test, whose score effectively reflects the extent to which a person feels that his or her life is worthwhile (Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995). To go beyond single individuals and measure the well-being of communities, one could administer SWL tests to community residents. But that would be costly and is thus done on limited population samples and once per year at best.