Luke Sloan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3650671 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke Sloan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | Sloan |
| SIGNATURE | SLOAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9458-9332 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Linking survey with Twitter data
Linking survey and social media data has gained popularity. However, obtaining consent from respondents to link social media is a known challenge. Using data from a nationally representative survey of the U.K. this study investigated whether respondents' a) activity frequency, b) activity variety and c) technical skills with smartphones are associated with consent to link Twitter data to survey responses. Additionally, this study explored mediati…
The Effect of the Brexit Vote on the Variation in Race and Religious Hate Crimes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
This paper examines possible mechanisms behind the spike in racially or religiously-aggravated (RR) offences after the Brexit vote. It adds to the current literature in five significant ways: (1) it provides the first Brexit-related RR hate crime comparison between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; (2) it reports on results from a national-level panel model that adds to the debate in the literature on whether pro-leave or pro-rema…
Linking Survey and Twitter Data
Linked survey and Twitter data present an unprecedented opportunity for social scientific analysis, but the ethical implications for such work are complex-requiring a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of Twitter data to fully appreciate the risks of disclosure and harm to participants. In this article, we draw on our experience of three recent linked data studies, briefly discussing the background research on data linkage and the…
Linking Twitter and Survey Data
In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and …
Who Tweets in the United Kingdom? Profiling the Twitter Population Using the British Social Attitudes Survey 2015
The headache any researcher faces while using Twitter data for social scientific analysis is that we do not know who tweets. In this article, we report on results from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2015 on Twitter use. We focus on associations between using Twitter and three demographic characteristics-age, sex, and class (defined here as National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification [NS-SEC]). In addition to this, we compare find…
A Tale of Two Sociologies
Several studies, in recent years, have demonstrated what has become known as the 'quantitative deficit' in UK sociology. This deficit is primarily manifested through negative student attitudes towards quantitative methods, a lack of ability in that area and a paucity of quantitative research and publication in the discipline that utilises quantitative methods. While we acknowledge the existence of that deficit, we argue in this article, and prese…
Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research
New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens o…
Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
A Retrospective on State of the Art Social Media Research Methods
This concluding chapter offers critical reflections on some of the key themes covered in the Handbook. Ethics emerged as a concern for many scholars, both for those engaging in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Scholars agree in that there is no overarching set of rules that can be applied to all projects blindly, rather they see ethical decisions as being grounded in the specifics of the data being collected, the social group under study,…
Social Science ‘Lite'? Deriving Demographic Proxies from Twitter
Crime Sensing with Big Data
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with 'big and broad data', from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings. The handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters. The holistic approach is organised int…
Characters to Victory
Can't Count or Won't Count? Embedding Quantitative Methods in Substantive Sociology Curricula
This paper reports on a quasi-experiment in which quantitative methods (QM) are embedded within a substantive sociology module. Through measuring student attitudes before and after the intervention alongside control group comparisons, we illustrate the impact that embedding has on the student experience. Our findings are complex and even contradictory. Whilst the experimental group were less likely to be distrustful of statistics and appreciate h…
Who Tweets? Deriving the Demographic Characteristics of Age, Occupation and Social Class from Twitter User Meta-Data
This paper specifies, designs and critically evaluates two tools for the automated identification of demographic data (age, occupation and social class) from the profile descriptions of Twitter users in the United Kingdom (UK). Meta-data data routinely collected through the Collaborative Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: http://www.cosmosproject.net/) relating to UK Twitter users is matched with the occupational lookup tables between job and soci…
Who Tweets with Their Location? Understanding the Relationship between Demographic Characteristics and the Use of Geoservices and Geotagging on Twitter
In this paper we take advantage of recent developments in identifying the demographic characteristics of Twitter users to explore the demographic differences between those who do and do not enable location services and those who do and do not geotag their tweets. We discuss the collation and processing of two datasets-one focusing on enabling geoservices and the other on tweet geotagging. We then investigate how opting in to either of these behav…
The Effects of Social Service Contact on Teenagers in England
Objective: This study investigated outcomes of social service contact during teenage years. Method: Secondary analysis was conducted of the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England ( N = 15,770), using data on reported contact with social services resulting from teenagers’ behavior. Outcomes considered were educational achievement and aspiration, mental health, and locus of control. Inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment was use…
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Voting systems in parallel and the benefits for small parties
In simple plurality voting systems smaller parties facing resource constraints may struggle to field candidates, particularly when the number of electoral districts is large. In the absence of a strong coordinating party organization, the pattern of contestation may also be sub-optimal – the small party fields candidates where support is minimal, ignoring other electoral districts where voters would support the party if it had stood a candidate. …
Can We Feel Their Presence? A New Framework for Investigating Minor Parties in English Local Government
Minor parties in English local government have largely been neglected by the research literature because of their lack of electoral success at the aggregate level. However, over the past decade minor party candidates have contested an increasing number of wards and this rise is disproportionate to their share of the vote. Developing the concept of ‘presence’ and a focus on wards rather than seats we use newly reworked data from the Elections Cent…
Tweeting the terror
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Knowing the Tweeters
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
David Plowright, Using Mixed Methods and Yoland Wadsworth, Do It Yourself Social Research and Yoland Wadsworth, Building in Research and Evaluation
The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with 'big and broad data', from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings. The handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters. The holistic approach is organised int…
Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research
New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens o…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Characters to Victory
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Tweeting the terror
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Knowing the Tweeters
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Linking Twitter and Survey Data
In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and …
Who Tweets in the United Kingdom? Profiling the Twitter Population Using the British Social Attitudes Survey 2015
The headache any researcher faces while using Twitter data for social scientific analysis is that we do not know who tweets. In this article, we report on results from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2015 on Twitter use. We focus on associations between using Twitter and three demographic characteristics-age, sex, and class (defined here as National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification [NS-SEC]). In addition to this, we compare find…
A Tale of Two Sociologies
Several studies, in recent years, have demonstrated what has become known as the 'quantitative deficit' in UK sociology. This deficit is primarily manifested through negative student attitudes towards quantitative methods, a lack of ability in that area and a paucity of quantitative research and publication in the discipline that utilises quantitative methods. While we acknowledge the existence of that deficit, we argue in this article, and prese…
Linking Survey and Twitter Data
Linked survey and Twitter data present an unprecedented opportunity for social scientific analysis, but the ethical implications for such work are complex-requiring a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of Twitter data to fully appreciate the risks of disclosure and harm to participants. In this article, we draw on our experience of three recent linked data studies, briefly discussing the background research on data linkage and the…
Can't Count or Won't Count? Embedding Quantitative Methods in Substantive Sociology Curricula
This paper reports on a quasi-experiment in which quantitative methods (QM) are embedded within a substantive sociology module. Through measuring student attitudes before and after the intervention alongside control group comparisons, we illustrate the impact that embedding has on the student experience. Our findings are complex and even contradictory. Whilst the experimental group were less likely to be distrustful of statistics and appreciate h…
Results of a training course for social workers on engaging fathers in child protection
Crime Sensing with Big Data
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
The Effect of the Brexit Vote on the Variation in Race and Religious Hate Crimes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
This paper examines possible mechanisms behind the spike in racially or religiously-aggravated (RR) offences after the Brexit vote. It adds to the current literature in five significant ways: (1) it provides the first Brexit-related RR hate crime comparison between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; (2) it reports on results from a national-level panel model that adds to the debate in the literature on whether pro-leave or pro-rema…
The Effects of Social Service Contact on Teenagers in England
Objective: This study investigated outcomes of social service contact during teenage years. Method: Secondary analysis was conducted of the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England ( N = 15,770), using data on reported contact with social services resulting from teenagers’ behavior. Outcomes considered were educational achievement and aspiration, mental health, and locus of control. Inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment was use…
Can We Feel Their Presence? A New Framework for Investigating Minor Parties in English Local Government
Minor parties in English local government have largely been neglected by the research literature because of their lack of electoral success at the aggregate level. However, over the past decade minor party candidates have contested an increasing number of wards and this rise is disproportionate to their share of the vote. Developing the concept of ‘presence’ and a focus on wards rather than seats we use newly reworked data from the Elections Cent…
Voting systems in parallel and the benefits for small parties
In simple plurality voting systems smaller parties facing resource constraints may struggle to field candidates, particularly when the number of electoral districts is large. In the absence of a strong coordinating party organization, the pattern of contestation may also be sub-optimal – the small party fields candidates where support is minimal, ignoring other electoral districts where voters would support the party if it had stood a candidate. …
Who Is Citing Whom in Social Work? A Response to Hodge, Lacasse and Benson
The top 100 most cited papers in social work journals in 2000–09 were recently listed in a British Journal of Social Work paper by Hodge, Lacasse and Benson. The citations of these 100 papers in a two-year period (2007–09) were identified and a further manual web-based search was conducted to identify some key features of the citing sources. Descriptive statistics are presented on language of publication and national location of citing authors, a…
Results of a training course for social workers on engaging fathers in child protection
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Knowing the Tweeters
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
David Plowright, Using Mixed Methods and Yoland Wadsworth, Do It Yourself Social Research and Yoland Wadsworth, Building in Research and Evaluation
The Effects of Social Service Contact on Teenagers in England
Objective: This study investigated outcomes of social service contact during teenage years. Method: Secondary analysis was conducted of the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England ( N = 15,770), using data on reported contact with social services resulting from teenagers’ behavior. Outcomes considered were educational achievement and aspiration, mental health, and locus of control. Inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment was use…
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Voting systems in parallel and the benefits for small parties
In simple plurality voting systems smaller parties facing resource constraints may struggle to field candidates, particularly when the number of electoral districts is large. In the absence of a strong coordinating party organization, the pattern of contestation may also be sub-optimal – the small party fields candidates where support is minimal, ignoring other electoral districts where voters would support the party if it had stood a candidate. …
Can We Feel Their Presence? A New Framework for Investigating Minor Parties in English Local Government
Minor parties in English local government have largely been neglected by the research literature because of their lack of electoral success at the aggregate level. However, over the past decade minor party candidates have contested an increasing number of wards and this rise is disproportionate to their share of the vote. Developing the concept of ‘presence’ and a focus on wards rather than seats we use newly reworked data from the Elections Cent…
Tweeting the terror
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Who Tweets? Deriving the Demographic Characteristics of Age, Occupation and Social Class from Twitter User Meta-Data
This paper specifies, designs and critically evaluates two tools for the automated identification of demographic data (age, occupation and social class) from the profile descriptions of Twitter users in the United Kingdom (UK). Meta-data data routinely collected through the Collaborative Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: http://www.cosmosproject.net/) relating to UK Twitter users is matched with the occupational lookup tables between job and soci…
Who Tweets with Their Location? Understanding the Relationship between Demographic Characteristics and the Use of Geoservices and Geotagging on Twitter
In this paper we take advantage of recent developments in identifying the demographic characteristics of Twitter users to explore the demographic differences between those who do and do not enable location services and those who do and do not geotag their tweets. We discuss the collation and processing of two datasets-one focusing on enabling geoservices and the other on tweet geotagging. We then investigate how opting in to either of these behav…
Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
A Retrospective on State of the Art Social Media Research Methods
This concluding chapter offers critical reflections on some of the key themes covered in the Handbook. Ethics emerged as a concern for many scholars, both for those engaging in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Scholars agree in that there is no overarching set of rules that can be applied to all projects blindly, rather they see ethical decisions as being grounded in the specifics of the data being collected, the social group under study,…
Social Science ‘Lite'? Deriving Demographic Proxies from Twitter
Crime Sensing with Big Data
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with 'big and broad data', from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings. The handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters. The holistic approach is organised int…
Characters to Victory
Can't Count or Won't Count? Embedding Quantitative Methods in Substantive Sociology Curricula
This paper reports on a quasi-experiment in which quantitative methods (QM) are embedded within a substantive sociology module. Through measuring student attitudes before and after the intervention alongside control group comparisons, we illustrate the impact that embedding has on the student experience. Our findings are complex and even contradictory. Whilst the experimental group were less likely to be distrustful of statistics and appreciate h…
Who Tweets in the United Kingdom? Profiling the Twitter Population Using the British Social Attitudes Survey 2015
The headache any researcher faces while using Twitter data for social scientific analysis is that we do not know who tweets. In this article, we report on results from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2015 on Twitter use. We focus on associations between using Twitter and three demographic characteristics-age, sex, and class (defined here as National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification [NS-SEC]). In addition to this, we compare find…
A Tale of Two Sociologies
Several studies, in recent years, have demonstrated what has become known as the 'quantitative deficit' in UK sociology. This deficit is primarily manifested through negative student attitudes towards quantitative methods, a lack of ability in that area and a paucity of quantitative research and publication in the discipline that utilises quantitative methods. While we acknowledge the existence of that deficit, we argue in this article, and prese…
Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research
New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens o…
Linking Survey and Twitter Data
Linked survey and Twitter data present an unprecedented opportunity for social scientific analysis, but the ethical implications for such work are complex-requiring a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of Twitter data to fully appreciate the risks of disclosure and harm to participants. In this article, we draw on our experience of three recent linked data studies, briefly discussing the background research on data linkage and the…
Linking Twitter and Survey Data
In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and …
Sociology (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Social media (15 works) · World Wide Web (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Data science (7 works) · Social science (7 works)