Researchers have developed various approaches for exploring the spatial information, temporal patterns, and Twitter content in topics of interest in order to generate a better understanding of human behavior; however, few investigations have integrated these three dimensions simultaneously. This study analyzes the content of tweets in order to conduct a spatiotemporal exploration of the main topics of interest in Kuwait in order to provide a deeper understanding of the topics people think about, when they think about them, and where they tweet about them. To this end, we collect, process, and analyze tweets from nearly 120 areas in Kuwait over a 10-month period. The study’s results indicate that religion, emotions, education, and public policy are the most popular topics of interest in Kuwait. Regarding the spatiotemporal analysis, people post more tweets regarding religion on Fridays, a holy day for Muslims in Kuwait. Moreover, people are more likely to tweet about policy and education on weekdays rather than weekends. In contrast, people tweet about emotional expressions more often on weekends. From the spatial perspectives, spatial clustering in topics occurs across the days of the week. The findings are applicable to further topic analysis and similar research in other countries.

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Although there is increased need for closing the gap between educational research and policy to better enable effective practice, addressing the problem remains a challenge. A review of current literature reveals a lack of systematic guidelines which clarify how collaboration between researchers and policy-makers can actually be achieved. Therefore, this study aims to articulate a framework which satisfies these needs. We used Lasswell’s stages heuristic model, integrated with perspectives from Kingdon's model, as a basis for building this framework, and conducted semi-structured interviews with nine experts in educational research and policy-making to gain understanding for how to effectuate their collaboration. The study identified six main stages for achieving effective collaboration, and the resulting framework could prove useful to future applications.

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