2-181 - Using “Big Data” to understand Parenting

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

For decades we have used traditional methods of interviews, ethnographies, experiments, and surveys to try and understand the behaviors and beliefs of parents. These methods have garnered a strong literature on describing positive and negative parent practices and helped us understand the challenges that parents face in helping their children develop into healthy and successful adults. However, with the advent of almost global access to the internet, the way that child rearing information is obtained and shared has changed dramatically. Our social science methods have not similarly changed to meet this new data challenge and opportunity. This multidisciplinary symposium brings together computer scientists, communication/media experts, and psychologists to examine and critique the type of “big data” opportunities for examining how parents use Twitter to acquire and disseminate parenting information. We will highlight research examining parenting information and dissemination data around autism, breastfeeding, and obesity/food preference focusing on the methods for obtaining and validating this data. The symposium will also provide a specific presentation on how researchers can obtain this data and some of the specific sampling and statistical methods used for organizing and testing this type of data. Using substantive examples, we hope to show both the promise and the limitations of these methods to developmental science. Our goal is to introduce new methods and data sources that are not traditionally used in the literature today but will be an important source of information on child and parent behaviors in the future.

Sub Unit

• Methods, History, Theory

Chair

• Pamela Davis-Kean, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Understanding Parenting through Social Media Data: What are People Tweeting about Breastfeeding? - Presenting Author: Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University

• Anxious Parenting: How information disseminates to Parents on Autism and Vaccinations on Twitter - Presenting Author: Leticia Bode, Georgetown University

• What Can Twitter tell us about Parenting? - Presenting Author: Pamela Davis-Kean, University of Michigan

• Using Open Source Data Streams in Traditional Social Science Research - Presenting Author: Lisa Singh, Georgetown University; Yanan Zhu, Georgetown University; Molly Crain, Georgetown University