Supplementing a survey with respondent Twitter data to measure e-cigarette information exposure

ABSTRACT

Social media data are increasingly used by researchers to gain insights on individuals’ behaviors and opinions. Platforms like Twitter provide access to individuals’ postings, networks of friends and followers, and the content to which they are exposed. This article presents the methods and results of an exploratory study to supplement survey data with respondents’ Twitter postings, networks of Twitter friends and followers, and information to which they were exposed about e-cigarettes. Twitter use is important to consider in e-cigarette research and other topics influenced by online information sharing and exposure. Further, Twitter metadata provide direct measures of user’s friends and followers as opposed to survey self-reports. We find that Twitter metadata provide similar information to survey questions on Twitter network size without inducing recall error or other measurement issues. Using sentiment coding and machine learning methods, we find Twitter can elucidate on topics difficult to measure via surveys such as online expressed opinions and network composition. We present and discuss models predicting whether respondents’ tweet positively about e-cigarettes using survey and Twitter data, finding the combined data to provide broader measures than either source alone.     

Assessing job self-efficacy and organizational commitment considering a mediating role of information asymmetry

This study establishes a model by drawing from key postulates and findings under information asymmetry to explain the formation of organization commitment and job self-efficacy. In the proposed model, organizational commitment and job self-efficacy are influenced indirectly by social support, knowledge creation, and information intensity via the mediation of decision-making quality and perceived opportunism. Knowledge creation is influenced directly by both social support and information intensity. Empirical testing of this model, by investigating personnel from firms in one of Taiwan's well-known industrial zones, confirms the applicability of information asymmetry in understanding employees’ organizational commitment and job self-efficacy. The test results indicate that all the model paths except one (linking perceived opportunism and job self-efficacy) are significant. Finally, the research provides managerial implications and limitations.     

Extreme probabilities for contingency tables under row and column independence with application to fisher's exact test

Theorerms are proved for the maxima and minima of IIR_i!/IIC_j!/T!II_yij ! over r× c contingcncy tables Y=(y_ij) with row sums R₁,…,R_r, column sums C₁,…,C_c, and grand total T. These results are imlplemented into the network algorithm of Mehta and Patel (1983) for computing the P-value of Fisher's exact test for unordered r×c contingency tables. The decrease in the amount of computing time can be substantial when the column sums are very different.     

Cultural Context of Career Choice: Meta‐Analysis of Race/Ethnicity Differences

The authors focus on career counseling from a cultural perspective, using the proxy construct of race/ethnicity. They briefly describe traditional career counseling and critique the degree to which the myriad cultural contexts that shape clients' career development are incorporated into vocational theories and practice. They conducted a meta‐analysis of research that has investigated the relationship between culture and vocational choice variables and concluded (a) that race/ethnicity differences do not greatly affect career aspirations but (b) that there are differences among racial/ethnic groups in perceptions of career‐related opportunities and barriers.     

Protecting children in Scotland: examining the impact of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995

This paper discusses findings from a small‐scale study of the impact on child protection practice following implementation of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. The Act introduced three new measures to allow the state to intervene in families to protect a child where there is a risk of significant harm. These include the child protection order, the child assessment order and the exclusion order. The child protection order provides for the removal of a child to (or his or her retention in) a place of safety. In the first two years of the operation of the 1995 Act fewer applications were made for this order compared with similar provisions under the previous legislation. This reduction in applications appears to be related to unfamiliarity with new legislation; greater scrutiny resulting from the more formal application to the sheriff court; and the introduction of a new legal criterion for intervention, the presence or likelihood of ‘significant harm’. The introduction of the ‘no order’ principle into Scottish child care law is also likely to be a factor.