Volume 40 - Article 25 | Pages 693–724  

Happy parents’ tweets: An exploration of Italian Twitter data using sentiment analysis

By Letizia Mencarini, Delia Irazú Hernández Farías, Mirko Lai, Viviana Patti, Emilio Sulis, Daniele Vignoli

Abstract

Background: Demographers are increasingly interested in connecting demographic behaviour and trends with 'soft' measures, i.e., complementary information on attitudes, values, feelings, and intentions.

Objective: The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how computational linguistic techniques can be used to explore opinions and semantic orientations related to parenthood.

Methods: In this article we scrutinize about three million filtered Italian tweets from 2014. First, we implement a methodological framework relying on Natural Language Processing techniques for text analysis, which is used to extract sentiments. We then run a supervised machine-learning experiment on the overall dataset, based on the annotated set of tweets from the previous stage. Consequently, we infer to what extent social media users report negative or positive affect on topics relevant to the fertility domain.

Results: Parents express a generally positive attitude towards being and becoming parents, but they are also fearful, surprised, and sad. They also have quite negative sentiments about their children’s future, politics, fertility, and parental behaviour. By exploiting geographical information from tweets we find a significant correlation between the prevalence of positive sentiments about parenthood and macro-regional indicators of both life satisfaction and fertility level.

Contribution: We show how tweets can be used to represent soft measures such as attitudes, values, and feelings, and we establish how they relate to demographic features. Linguistic analysis of social media data provides a middle ground between qualitative studies and more standard quantitative approaches.

Author’s Affiliation

• Letizia Mencarini - Università Bocconi, Italy EMAIL
• Delia Irazú Hernández Farías - Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain EMAIL
• Mirko Lai - Università degli Studi di Torino (UNITO), Italy EMAIL
• Viviana Patti - Università degli Studi di Torino (UNITO), Italy EMAIL
• Emilio Sulis - Università degli Studi di Torino (UNITO), Italy EMAIL
• Daniele Vignoli - Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

‘Silver splits’ in Europe: The role of grandchildren and other correlates
Volume 46 - Article 21

Union formation under conditions of uncertainty: The objective and subjective sides of employment uncertainty
Volume 45 - Article 5

Time preferences and fertility: Evidence from Italy
Volume 44 - Article 50

Persistent joblessness and fertility intentions
Volume 40 - Article 8

Parents’ subjective well-being after their first child and declining fertility expectations
Volume 39 - Article 9

The positive impact of women’s employment on divorce: Context, selection, or anticipation?
Volume 38 - Article 37

Uncertain lives: Insights into the role of job precariousness in union formation in Italy
Volume 35 - Article 10

What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework sharing, and babies
Volume 32 - Article 30

Religion and union formation in Italy: Catholic precepts, social pressure, and tradition
Volume 31 - Article 35

Towards a new understanding of cohabitation: Insights from focus group research across Europe and Australia
Volume 31 - Article 34

Whose job instability affects the likelihood of becoming a parent in Italy? A tale of two partners
Volume 26 - Article 2

Things change: Women’s and men’s marital disruption dynamics in Italy during a time of social transformations, 1970-2003
Volume 24 - Article 5

Rising marital disruption in Italy and its correlates
Volume 20 - Article 4

Albania: Trends and patterns, proximate determinants and policies of fertility change
Volume 19 - Article 11

Gender equity and fertility intentions in Italy and the Netherlands
Volume 18 - Article 1

Fertility change in Egypt: From second to third birth
Volume 15 - Article 18

Similarities and differences between two cohorts of young adults in Italy: Results of a CATI survey on transition to adulthood
Volume 15 - Article 5

Youth poverty and transition to adulthood in Europe
Volume 15 - Article 2

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Higher incomes are increasingly associated with higher fertility: Evidence from the Netherlands, 2008–2022
Volume 51 - Article 26    | Keywords: fertility, income, inequalities, Netherlands, parenthood

Pathways and obstacles to parenthood among women in same-sex couples in Spain
Volume 50 - Article 35    | Keywords: assisted reproduction, family, fertility desires, LGBTQ, parenthood, same-sex couples

Couples' paid work, state-level unemployment, and first births in the United States
Volume 45 - Article 38    | Keywords: breadwinner, dual earners, Great Recession, parenthood, social norms, unemployment

Estimating abortion incidence using the network scale-up method
Volume 43 - Article 56    | Keywords: abortion, indirect estimation, social network

Intergenerational coresidence and subjective well-being of older adults in China: The moderating effect of living arrangement preference and intergenerational contacts
Volume 41 - Article 48    | Keywords: China, intergenerational contacts, intergenerational coresidence, living arrangements, subjective well-being