Browsing by Author "Freire-Vidal, Yerka"
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Item A Framework to Understand Attitudes towards Immigration through Twitter(2021) Freire-Vidal, Yerka; Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Rowe, FranciscoUnderstanding public opinion towards immigrants is key to prevent acts of violence, discrimination and abuse. Traditional data sources, such as surveys, provide rich insights into the formation of such attitudes; yet, they are costly and offer limited temporal granularity, providing only a partial understanding of the dynamics of attitudes towards immigrants. Leveraging Twitter data and natural language processing, we propose a framework to measure attitudes towards immigration in online discussions. Grounded in theories of social psychology, the proposed framework enables the classification of users’ into profile stances of positive and negative attitudes towards immigrants and characterisation of these profiles quantitatively summarising users’ content and temporal stance trends. We use a Twitter sample composed of 36 K users and 160 K tweets discussing the topic in 2017, when the immigrant population in the country recorded an increase by a factor of four from 2010. We found that the negative attitude group of users is smaller than the positive group, and that both attitudes have different distributions of the volume of content. Both types of attitudes show fluctuations over time that seem to be influenced by news events related to immigration. Accounts with negative attitudes use arguments of labour competition and stricter regulation of immigration. In contrast, accounts with positive attitudes reflect arguments in support of immigrants’ human and civil rights. The framework and its application can inform policy makers about how people feel about immigration, with possible implications for policy communication and the design of interventions to improve negative attitudes.Publication Attitudes towards migration in a COVID-19 context: testing a behavioral immune system hypothesis with Twitter data(2024) Freire-Vidal, Yerka; Fajardo, Gabriela; Rodriguez-Sickert, Carlos; Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Muñoz Reyes, José Antonio; Figueroa, OrianaThe COVID-19 outbreak implied many changes in the daily life of most of the world’s population for a long time, prompting severe restrictions on sociality. The Behavioral ImmuneSystem (BIS) suggests that when facing pathogens, a psychological mechanism would be activated that, among other things, would generate an increase in prejudice and discrimination towards marginalized groups, including immigrants. This study aimed to test if people tend to enhance their rejection of minorities and foreign groups under the threat of contagious diseases, using the users’ attitudes towards migrants in Twitter data from Chile, for pre-pandemic and pandemic contexts. Our results appear to be mostly against the BIS hypothesis, with some faint exceptions, since threatened users increased their tweet production in the pandemic period, compared to empathetic users, but the latter grew in number and also increased the reach of their tweets between the two periods. We also found differences in the use of language between these types of users. Alternative explanations for these results may be context-dependent.