#ReproHealth: A State-Based Investigation of Reproductive Health Rights Policy and Social Media Activity

#ReproHealth: A State-Based Investigation of Reproductive Health Rights Policy and Social Media Activity

Morgan, Corrin; Alexander, Erika; Watts, Jerome; Noble, Aaron; Haimson, Oliver L. (2016). #ReproHealth: A State-Based Investigation of Reproductive Health Rights Policy and Social Media Activity. In iConference 2016 Proceedings. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89391

Research Advisor: Oliver Haimson, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California at Irvine

Social media is a critical avenue for national discourse – raising awareness, advocating for specific campaigns, mocking current events, and truly revealing the pulse of a nation though the lens of its citizens. With the current fascination regarding big data, there is a push towards discovering correlations between one’s behavior online and their actions in the physical world. Our research seeks to establish a correlation between social media activity and policy in the context of reproductive health. We analyzed state-based reproductive rights policy along with Twitter activity related to reproductive health issues, and found a significant correlation between online political discourse within states and those states’ political and policy-oriented leanings on reproductive health.

Status: Published at iConference 2016