74 research outputs found
Demographic Differentials in Facebook Usage Around the World
We use data from the Facebook Advertisement Platform to study patterns of
demographic disparities in usage of Facebook across countries. We address three
main questions: (1) How does Facebook usage differ by age and by gender around
the world? (2) How does the size of friendship networks vary by age and by
gender? (3) What are the demographic characteristics of specific subgroups of
Facebook users? We find that in countries in North America and northern Europe,
patterns of Facebook usage differ little between older people and younger
adults. In Asian countries, which have high levels of gender inequality,
differences in Facebook adoption by gender disappear at older ages, possibly as
a result of selectivity. We also observe that across countries, women tend to
have larger networks of close friends than men, and that female users who are
living away from their hometown are more likely to engage in Facebook use than
their male counterparts, regardless of their region and age group. Our findings
contextualize recent research on gender gaps in online usage, and offer new
insights into some of the nuances of demographic differentials in the adoption
and the use of digital technologies.Comment: Accepted at a poster at ICWSM 2019. Please cite the ICWSM versio
Leveraging digital and computational demography for policy insights
Situated at the intersection of the computational and demographic sciences, digital and computational demography explores how new digital data streams and computational methods advance the understanding of population dynamics, along with the impacts of digital technologies on population outcomes, e.g. linked to health, fertility and migration. Encompassing the data, methodological and social impacts of digital technologies, we outline key opportunities provided by digital and computational demography for generating policy insights. Within methodological opportunities, individual-level simulation approaches, such as microsimulation and agent-based modelling, infused with different data, provide tools to create empirically informed synthetic populations that can serve as virtual laboratories to test the impact of different social policies (e.g. fertility policies, support for the elderly or bereaved people). Individual-level simulation approaches allow also to assess policy-relevant questions about the impacts of demographic changes linked to ageing, climate change and migration. Within data opportunities, digital trace data provide a system for early warning with detailed spatial and temporal granularity, which are useful to monitor demographic quantities in real time or for understanding societal responses to demographic change. The demographic perspective highlights the importance of understanding population heterogeneity in the use and impacts of different types of digital technologies, which is crucial towards building more inclusive digital spaces
Professional Gender Gaps Across US Cities
Gender imbalances in work environments have been a long-standing concern.
Identifying the existence of such imbalances is key to designing policies to
help overcome them. In this work, we study gender trends in employment across
various dimensions in the United States. This is done by analyzing anonymous,
aggregate statistics that were extracted from LinkedIn's advertising platform.
The data contain the number of male and female LinkedIn users with respect to
(i) location, (ii) age, (iii) industry and (iv) certain skills. We studied
which of these categories correlate the most with high relative male or female
presence on LinkedIn. In addition to examining the summary statistics of the
LinkedIn data, we model the gender balance as a function of the different
employee features using linear regression. Our results suggest that the gender
gap varies across all feature types, but the differences are most profound
among industries and skills. A high correlation between gender ratios of people
in our LinkedIn data set and data provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
serves as external validation for our results.Comment: Accepted at a poster at ICWSM 2018. Please cite the ICWSM versio
Fertility and its Meaning: Evidence from Search Behavior
Fertility choices are linked to the different preferences and constraints of
individuals and couples, and vary importantly by socio-economic status, as well
by cultural and institutional context. The meaning of childbearing and
child-rearing, therefore, differs between individuals and across groups. In
this paper, we combine data from Google Correlate and Google Trends for the
U.S. with ground truth data from the American Community Survey to derive new
insights into fertility and its meaning. First, we show that Google Correlate
can be used to illustrate socio-economic differences on the circumstances
around pregnancy and birth: e.g., searches for "flying while pregnant" are
linked to high income fertility, and "paternity test" are linked to non-marital
fertility. Second, we combine several search queries to build predictive models
of regional variation in fertility, explaining about 75% of the variance.
Third, we explore if aggregated web search data can also be used to model
fertility trends.Comment: This is a preprint of a short paper accepted at ICWSM'17. Please cite
that version instea
Covid-19: A Tsunami That Amplifies Existing Trends in Demographic Research
The author argues that the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the increasing importance of data innovation, and the role of digital connections for social relationships and as determinants of health and inequalities
Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants' Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data
The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating
culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on
musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of
individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze
self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the
relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host
population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural
assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant
cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which
problematizes their use as assimilative "benchmarks" in the literature.
Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence
vis-\`a-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who
speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our
findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical
expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character.Comment: WebConf 201
Close Social Networks Among Older Adults:The Online and Offline Perspectives
Qualitative studies have found that the use of Information and Communication Technologies is related to an enhanced quality of life for older adults, as these technologies might act as a medium to access social capital regardless of geographical distance. In order to quantitatively study the association between older people’s characteristics and the likelihood of having a network of close friends offline and online, we use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and data from Facebook. Using a novel approach to analyze aggregated and anonymous Facebook data within a regression framework, we show that the associations between having close friends and age, sex, and being a parent are the same offline and online. Migrants who use internet are less likely to have close friends offline, but migrants who are Facebook users are more likely to have close friends online, suggesting that digital relationships may compensate for the potential lack of offline close friendships among older migrants
- …