Social Media Based Demographics Analysis for Understanding Disaster Response Disparity

• In Event: 4124 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (100 min): Table 5. Environment/Climate/Natural Disasters

Abstract

Social groups are characterized by their demographic characters such as race/ethnicity and gender. Different demographic groups were found to have experienced significantly varying impacts of the same disasters. For instance, ethnic minorities were impacted more severely than the white during Hurricane Katrina. These varying impacts can be reflected in their different crisis responses. However, research on disaster response disparities among different demographic groups remains a critical challenge due to the lack of disaggregated-level data classified by demographic characters. To fill in this gap, this research takes the first step to investigate the demographics of affected citizens during Hurricane Florence. This paper infers social media users’ demographic characters from their users’ names. The results are used for analyzing social media activities in different demographic groups. This study found the white groups performed most active while the black group acted least active in talking about the hurricane event on social media. Moreover, the female affected citizens were found to be less active than the male affected citizens on social media during Hurricane Florence. The comparative results of demographic compositions among the affected and not-affected citizens have presented different distributions. Our findings can help the classification of Twitter data by demographic groups. The classified Twitter data can be further used for exploring the sentiment and concerns of different demographic groups. The understanding of varying sentiment and concerns of different demographic groups can help crisis response managers design and implement on-target response strategies.

Authors

• Faxi Yuan, University of Florida

• Min Li, Western Carolina University