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Italian happy parents In Twitter

Author

Listed:
  • Letizia Mencarini
  • Delia Irazú Hernández-Farías
  • Mirko Lai
  • Viviana Patti
  • Emilio Sulis
  • Daniele Vignoli

Abstract

his article explores opinions and semantic orientation around fertility and parenthood by scrutinizing filtered Italian Twitter data. We propose a novel methodological framework relying on Natural Language Processing techniques for text analysis, which is aimed at extracting sentiments from texts. A manual annotation for exploring sentiment and attitudes to fertility and parenthood was applied to Twitter data. The resulting set of tweets (corpus) was analysed through sentiment and emotion lexicons in order to highlight how affective language is used in this domain. It emerges that parents express a generally positive attitude towards their children and being and become parents, but quite negative sentiments on children’s future, politics and fertility and also parental behaviour. Exploiting geographical information from tweets, we find a significant correlation between the prevalence of positive sentiments about parenthood and macro-regional indicators for both life satisfaction and fertility levels.

Suggested Citation

  • Letizia Mencarini & Delia Irazú Hernández-Farías & Mirko Lai & Viviana Patti & Emilio Sulis & Daniele Vignoli, 2018. "Italian happy parents In Twitter," Working Papers 117, "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
    • Handle: RePEc:don:donwpa:117
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Fauth, Rebecca C. & Winestone, Jessica Greenstone, 2021. "Home visiting and justice system collaborations: Two Programs’ approaches to advocating for justice system-involved parents," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).

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    Keywords

    sentiment analysis; social media; fertility; parenthood; subjective well-being; linguistic corpora;
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