Researchers have long measured people’s thoughts, feelings, and personalities using carefully designed survey questions, which are often given to a relatively small number of volunteers. The proliferation of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, offers alternative measurement approaches: automatic content coding at unprecedented scales and the statistical power to do open-vocabulary exploratory analysis. We describe a range of automatic and partially automatic content analysis techniques and illustrate how their use on social media generates insights into subjective well-being, health, gender differences, and personality.
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