Do Teachers Get What They Hope for on Twitter? Social Support in Tweets and Responses

• In Event: International Perspective on Advantages and Disadvantages of Teachers' Social Media Use

Abstract

Purpose & Framework
Many teachers use social media to give and receive social support. This includes providing or searching for materials (instrumental support), advice (informational support), or camaraderie (emotional support; Authors, 2021; Authors, 2021). However, we know little about whether teachers receive what they look for when seeking social support via social media. For example, in one recent study a quarter of teachers’ posts to six Facebook groups went unanswered or received irrelevant responses (van Bommel et al., 2020). Whether postings elicit responses may depend in part on user characteristics and their messages (Koehler & Rosenberg, 2018). However, it remains unclear, for example, if tweet sentiment is important to the likelihood of teachers receiving responses. This study therefore examines the following questions: (RQ1) How intensively do teachers use Twitter to seek social support; (RQ2) What type of social support do teachers seek on Twitter; (RQ3) Do teachers get the social support they seek; (RQ4) Do user or tweet characteristics predict the chance of getting the sought-after support?

Methods & Data
Our data includes 996 tweets and 1,258 responses posted on Twitter in February 2022 using #twlz—a popular German education-related hashtag used by teachers. All tweets and responses were coded manually in a multi-step process (Table 1). First, tweets were identified as either providing or seeking social support. Second, tweets and responses were dummy-coded as to whether they contained emotional, informational, or instrumental support. Third, for tweets seeking social support, we coded whether there was at least one response providing the sought form of social support. On this basis, we conducted a series of descriptive analyses to examine which forms of social support appeared in tweets and responses and whether the form of support sought in the tweet and the support offered in the responses matched. Finally, we ran a logistic regression to predict the likelihood that a tweet will be matched by a response.

Results
RQ1: Overall, 32.7% of tweets sought one or more forms of social support. RQ2: In these tweets, teachers looked for emotional (50.6%), informational (33.4%), and instrumental (28.8%) support. RQ3: Tweets seeking social support received 811 total responses (M=2.49 responses/tweet; SD=4.11). Tweets seeking emotional support (M=2.16; SD=4.29) received fewer responses than tweets seeking informational (M=3.12; SD=4.08) or instrumental (M=2.71; SD=4.26) support. Moreover, 63.1% of the tweets seeking emotional support received matching responses, while 75.9% and 84.4% of tweets seeking informational and instrumental support, respectively, received such support. RQ4: Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that the overall likelihood of receiving the desired social support was neither related to tweet sentiment nor to users’ number of followers (Table 2).

Scholarly Significance
This study aims to address a gap in research on teachers' social media use. Our results show that while teachers actively seek social support via Twitter, these calls for help sometimes go unanswered. Users with larger networks do not necessarily receive more support, suggesting that new or less prolific users may be able to derive similar social support benefits from Twitter.

Authors

• Eric Richter, Universität Potsdam
  Presenting Author

• André Meyer, University of Potsdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dirk Richter, University of Potsdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Elon University
  Non-Presenting Author