“Social network, activity space, sentiment and evacuation: what can social media tell us?” authored by Yuqin Jiang, Zhenlong Li, and Susan L. Cutter has been accepted by the Annals of the American Association of Geographers!
Abstract: Hurricanes are one of the most common natural hazards in the United States. To reduce fatalities and economic losses, coastal states and counties take protective actions including sheltering in place and evacuation away from the coast. Not everyone adheres to hurricane evacuation warnings or orders. In reality evacuation rates are far less than 100 percent and are estimated using post-hurricane questionnaire surveys to residents in the affected area. To overcome limitations of traditional data collection methods that are costly in time and resources, an increasing number of natural hazard studies have used social media data as a data source. To better understand social media users’ evacuation behavior, this paper investigates whether activity space, social network, and long-term sentiment trends are associated with individual’s evacuation decision by measuring and comparing Twitter user’s evacuation decision during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. We find that 1) evacuated people have larger long-term activity spaces than non-evacuated people, 2) people in the same social network tend to make the same evacuation decision, and 3) evacuated people have smaller long-term sentimental variances than non-evacuated people. These results are consistent with previous studies based on questionnaire and survey data, and thus provide researchers a new method to study human behavior during disasters.
Full paper can be accessed here.
