Social Network, Activity Space, Sentiment, and Evacuation

What Can Social Media Tell Us

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3775799
AutoresYuqin Jiang (0000-0003-0632-624X, University of South Carolina), Zhenlong Li (0000-0002-8938-5466, University of South Carolina), Susan L Cutter (0000-0002-7005-8596, University of South Carolina)
Ano2019
Volume109
Fascículo6
Páginas1795-1810
Data de publicação2019-11-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2019.1592660
OpenAlexW2947138442
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas18
Referências citadas59

Hurricanes are one of the most common natural hazards in the United States. To reduce fatalities and economic losses, coastal states and counties take protective actions, including sheltering in place and evacuation away from the coast. Not everyone adheres to hurricane evacuation warnings or orders. In reality, evacuation rates are far less than 100 percent and are estimated using posthurricane questionnaire surveys to residents in the affected area. To overcome limitations of traditional data collection methods that are costly in time and resources, an increasing number of natural hazards studies have used social media data as a data source. To better understand social media users’ evacuation behaviors, this article investigates whether activity space, social network, and long-term sentiment trends are associated with individuals’ evacuation decisions by measuring and comparing Twitter users’ evacuation decisions during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. We find that (1) evacuated people have larger long-term activity spaces than nonevacuated people, (2) people in the same social network tend to make the same evacuation decision, and (3) evacuated people have smaller long-term sentimental variances than nonevacuated people. These results are consistent with previous studies based on questionnaire and survey data and thus provide researchers a new method to study human behavior during disasters. Key Words: big data, disaster management, evacuation, hurricane, social media

Business · Geography · Meteorology · Natural disaster · Natural hazard · Social media · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Disaster Management and Resilience · Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics · Public Relations and Crisis Communication