ERIC Number: EJ1457723
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Feb
Pages: 36
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0049-1241
EISSN: EISSN-1552-8294
A Method for Estimating Individual Socioeconomic Status of Twitter Users
Sociological Methods & Research, v54 n1 p38-73 2025
The rise of social media has opened countless opportunities to explore social science questions with new data and methods. However, research on socioeconomic inequality remains constrained by limited individual-level socioeconomic status (SES) measures in digital trace data. Following Bourdieu, we argue that the commercial and entertainment accounts Twitter users follow reflect their economic and cultural capital. Adapting a political science method for inferring political ideology, we use correspondence analysis to estimate the SES of 3,482,652 Twitter users who follow the accounts of 339 brands in the United States. We validate our estimates with data from the Facebook Marketing application programming interface, self-reported job titles on users' Twitter profiles, and a small survey sample. The results show reasonable correlations with the standard proxies for SES, alongside much weaker or nonsignificant correlations with other demographic variables. The proposed method opens new opportunities for innovative social research on inequality on Twitter and similar online platforms.
Descriptors: Socioeconomic Status, Web Sites, Social Media, Reputation, Consumer Economics, Correlation, Cultural Capital, Test Validity, Electronic Publishing, Individual Characteristics, Predictor Variables
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A