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Special Topic
PSYC469 Special Topic - Social Media Analytics in Psychology Psychological researchers are increasingly turning to new methods of research beyond traditional survey, experimental, and psychophysiological methodology. One emerging method has been utilizing social media data as a naturalistic resource for individuals’ perspectives, attitudes, and behaviours, through computational methods. This course will introduce students to these computational techniques to enable students to use these novel methods for their own research. Accordingly, this course will break down methods used to obtain social media and other digital trace data, beginning with data scraping using Application Programme Interfaces (APIs), and analysis techniques like network analyses, and simple natural language processing (e.g., sentiment analysis and topic modelling). Examples will be given on how these analyses can be applied to a variety of psychology subfields, such as I/O Psychology, Forensic Psychology, and Clinical and Health Psychology.
By the end of the course, students should gain the practical skills needed to conduct simple quantitative analyses of social media data. They should be able to:Interact with various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to pull data from social/digital media sources (e.g., Reddit, Twitch, Spotify).Construct a simple social network and identify influencers with high centrality.Analyse post sentiment and construct a topic model.Construct a machine learning model to predict post popularity.Become comfortable with working in the R environment.
Subject to approval of the Head of Department
Students must attend one activity from each section.
Kong Meng Liew
James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., & Tibshirani, R; An introduction to statistical learning ; New York: Springer, 2013.
Szabo, G., Polatkan, G., Boykin, P. O., & Chalkiopoulos, A; Social media data mining and analytics ; John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
Domestic fee $1,110.00
International Postgraduate fees
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing .