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A National Comparison: Twitter versus the American Housing Survey

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Urban Social Listening

Abstract

We examine differences in resident perceptions of neighborhood quality of life, as well as expressed positive and negative sentiment while accounting for changes in population among cities between 1970 and 2010. We find no evidence that population loss leads to a lower evaluation of life satisfaction. Additionally, we find while tweets are a source for consistently determining the positive and negative affect of individuals on a geographic basis and that people generally have a positive feeling about their neighborhood, there are no significant relationships between the Twitter data sets and traditional ones. Thus, planners or policy makers should not presume that a singular measure will provide a complete picture of well-being.

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Hollander, J.B., Graves, E., Renski, H., Foster-Karim, C., Wiley, A., Das, D. (2016). A National Comparison: Twitter versus the American Housing Survey. In: Urban Social Listening. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59491-4_5

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