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Download fileTowards tracking and analysing regional alcohol consumption patterns in the UK through the use of social media
conference contribution
posted on 2016-09-08, 08:50 authored by Daniel Kershaw, Matthew Rowe, Patrick StaceyPatrick StaceyMonitoring rates of alcohol consumption across the UK is
a timely problem due to ever-increasing drinking levels [36].
This has led to calls from public services (e.g. police and
health services) to assess the effect it is having on people and
society. Current research methods that are utilised to assess
consumption patterns are costly, time consuming, and do
not supply sufficiently detailed results. This is because they
look at snapshots of individuals' drinking patterns, which
rely on generalised usage patterns, and post consumption re-
call. In this paper we look into the use of social media such as
Twitter (a popular micro blogging site) to monitor the rate
of alcohol consumption in regions across the UK by introducing the Social Media Alcohol Index (SMAI). By looking at
the variation in term usage, and treating the social network
as a spatio-temporal self-reporting sense-network, we aim
to discover variation in drinking patterns on both local and
national levels within the UK. This study used 31.6 million
tweets collected over a 6 week period, and used the Health
& Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) weekly alcohol
consumption pattern as a ground truth. High correlations
between the ground truth and the computed SMAI (Social
Media Alcohol Index) were found on a national and local
level, along with the ability to detect variation in consumption on National holidays and celebrations at both local and
national levels.
Funding
This work is funded by the Digital Economy programme (RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1), which supports the High- Wire Centre for Doctoral Training (http://highwire.lancaster. ac.uk).
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business