Study uses Twitter to analyze factors that affect the subjective well-being of university students

Previous research has shown that it is possible to predict Twitter users' personalities and mental health by analyzing their social network and word statistics information. A research team from Japan's University of Tsukuba recently investigated the correlation between university students' social skills, tweets and retweets, emotional expressions, and types of topics and their subjective well-being.

The results showed that students who used fewer negative expressions had higher levels of subjective well-being, and there was a positive correlation between topics such as social events and personal hobbies and subjective well-being. However, topics such as politics were negatively correlated with subjective well-being. The work is published in the journal BMC Public Health.

This study conducted a survey targeting university students enrolled in the Kanto Region, Japan, and investigated the relationship between their personality traits, including generalized trust, self-consciousness, and friendship, and their desire for self-presentation and subjective well-being including the effects of their online communication skills.

Furthermore, the researchers analyzed the Twitter log data of these users from January 2019 to June 2021 using natural language processing. They analyzed the data according to the students' grades and compared different groups based on the types of social media they used.

The results showed that the number of tweets and retweets increased overall; the ratio of positive sentences decreased slightly, whereas the proportion of negative sentences increased slightly. In addition, compared with the students who used other types of social media, those who used only Twitter had the lowest levels of subjective well-being, and their desire for self-appeal decreased their levels of subjective well-being.