JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Scholars have data from in-person interviews, administrative data, and surveys for sexual violence research. Using Twitter as a data source for examining the nature of sexual violence is a relatively new and under-explored area of study.

Objective:

This study aims to provide a scoping review of the current literature on using Twitter data for researching sexual violence, elaborate on the validity of the methods, and discuss the implications and limitations of existing studies.

Methods:

We performed a literature search in six databases: APA PsycInfo (Ovid), Scopus, PubMed, International Bibliography of Social Sciences (ProQuest), Criminal Justice Abstracts (EBSCO), and Communications Abstracts (EBSCO) in April 2022. The initial search identified 3,759 articles that were imported into Covidence. Six independent reviewers screened these articles following two steps: (1) titles and abstracts and (2) full-text screening. The inclusion criteria were (1) empirical research, (2) focusing on sexual violence, (3) analyzing Twitter data (i.e., tweets and/or Twitter metadata), and (4) writing in English. Finally, six authors selected 121 articles that met the inclusion criteria and coded these articles.

Results:

We coded and presented the 121 articles using Twitter-based data for sexual violence research. About 70% of the articles were published in peer-reviewed journals after 2018. The reviewed articles collectively analyzed about 79.6 million Tweets. The primary approach to using Twitter as a data source was content text analysis (n=112, 92.5%) and sentiments (n=31, 25.6%). Hashtags (n=77, 83.7%) were the most prominent metadata features, followed by the time and date of the tweet, retweets, replies, URLs, and geotags. More than half of the articles (n=51, 38.3%) used the application programming interface to collect Twitter data. Data analyses included qualitative thematic analysis, machine learning (e.g., sentiment analysis, supervised machine learning, unsupervised machine learning, social network analysis), and quantitative analysis. Only ten percent of the studies discussed ethical considerations in their articles.

Conclusions:

We describe the current state of using Twitter data for sexual violence research, develop a new taxonomy describing Twitter as a data source and evaluate the methodologies. Research recommendations include the following: the development of methods for data collection and analysis, in-depth discussions about ethical norms, specific aspects of sexual violence on Twitter, examinations of tweets in multiple languages, and generalizability of Twitter data. The current review demonstrates the potential of using Twitter data in sexual violence research.