Community awareness and sentiment inequalities during Winter Storm Uri

Keywords: natural disaster, social media, geospatial analysis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

External stressors, such as pandemics and natural disasters have been demonstrated to cause emotional distress and depression. The literature has suggested that these stressors’ adverse impacts fall disproportionately on disadvantaged populations, leading to changing levels of happiness and inequalities. The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown/social distancing policies, compounded by the Winter Storm Uri in early 2021, have caused tremendous infrastructural damages and disruptions to social networks and various degrees of mental stress and depression among different populations in Texas communities. As communities recover from the physical damages of Uri, mental health restoration also requires urgent policy and research attention. Therefore, monitoring subjective well-being across time and space and initiating actions to assist the restoration of happiness is critical for the recovery of communities and the long-term equity and resilience of society. In this study, we analyzed Twitter data to develop community awareness and sentiment indices. Social media data harvest users’ digital traces that rapidly reflect their experiences and subjective feelings at a low cost and reliable manner. By integrating socioeconomic factors, urban amenities, and events data such as Uri-induced impacts, we tried to identify the least happy communities and the underlying reasons and arguments behind low subjective well-being under external stressors.