I came across this article (by Benedict Carey) posted on the New York Times website and found it pretty interesting. It talks about the correlation between different times of day/different days of the week and our happiness levels (determined by people’s posts on Twitter). I thought it was a good example of how scientists and/or sociologists are using social media to analyze how people work or think.
Here are some quotes of interest from the article:
“After accounting for these differences, the researchers determined that for the average user in each country, positive posts crested around breakfast time, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.; they fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner”
-BENEDICT CAREY
“There’s just a torrent of new digital data coming into the field, and it’s transforming the social sciences, creating new lenses to look at all sorts of behaviors,”
-Peter Sheridan Dodds (researcher at the University of Vermont)
