Coping Strategies and Mental Health Impact of Climate Change. A Text Mining Approach implemented on Instagram.
Method Stream: Text Mining
ECs: Only 14 EC (standard, no or limited own data collection. Applicable in case of a clinical internship)
Description:
Climate change has become a dominant topic over the last few years and is recognized as one of the 21st century's most significant global threats. Furthermore, a range of emotional responses linked explicitly to climate change, such as helplessness and shame, has been identified as preventing some from taking protective actions (Mkono & Hughes, 2020; Salomon et al., 2017), along with anxiety, grief, and guilt (Ágoston et al., 2022).
Furthermore, social media is part of everyday life and a resource that usually receives negative attention due to the overall consequences of its overuse. However, social media can also be beneficial in providing individuals worldwide with a supportive community and a platform where people can share their concerns.
The available research regarding concerns, mental health issues, coping strategies, and support shared by users on large social platforms, such as Instagram, regarding climate change is still underexplored. This study aims to explore this affectation and the coping strategies shared in @everydayclimatechange, @careaboutclimate, among others. Tools like text mining are a promising option for exploring extensive information, such as posts on Instagram, and have been used in previous studies, including Hammar et al. (2018).
In this study, several research questions can be answered, such as:
· What mental health effects caused by climate change are most frequently discussed on Instagram and what patterns emerge from them?
· What coping strategies are shared by users on Instagram to cope with mental health affectations caused by climate change?
· What language patterns emerge in different Instagram accounts related to climate change?
Among others. For this project, we will need to work with 3 students that will complement each other's work.
References:
Ágoston, C., Urbán, R., Nagy, B., Csaba, B., Kőváry, Z., Kovács, K., ... & Demetrovics, Z. (2022). The psychological consequences of the ecological crisis: Three new questionnaires to assess eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and ecological grief. Climate Risk Management, 37, 100441.
Hammar, K., Jaradat, S., Dokoohaki, N., & Matskin, M. (2018, December). Deep text mining of Instagram data without strong supervision. In 2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) (pp. 158–165). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/WI.2018.00-47
Mkono, M., & Hughes, K. (2020). Eco-guilt and eco-shame in tourism consumption contexts: Understanding the triggers and responses. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 28(8), 1223-1244.
Salomon, E., Preston, J. L., & Tannenbaum, M. B. (2017). Climate change helplessness and the (de) moralization of individual energy behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 23(1), 15.
Who are we looking for?
Students interested in Climate Change, text mining, Instagram, and coping strategies.