Social Impact of Psychological Research on Well-Being Shared in Social Media

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Social Impact in Social Media (SISM, hereinafter) methodology applied in psychological research provides evidence for the visibility of the social impact of the research. This article helps researchers become aware of whether and how their improvements are capturing the interest of citizens and how citizens are applying such evidence and obtaining better outcomes, in this case, in relation to well-being. In addition, citizens can access the latest evidence on social media and act as channels of communication between science and social or personal networks and, in doing so, they can improve the living conditions of others. This methodology is also useful for agencies that support researchers in psychology with financial assistance, which can use it to evaluate the social impact of the funds that they invest in research. In this article, the 10 studies on well-being were selected for analysis using the following criteria: their research results led to demonstrable improvement in well-being, and these improvements are presented on social media. We applied the social impact coverage ratio to identify the percentage of the social impact shared in social media in relation to the total amount of social media data collected. Finally, examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of the social impact of the research on well-being are presented.

Social Media for Knowledge Acquisition and Dissemination: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Collaborative Learning Driven Social Media Adoption

“…This is possible if students' needs and their formative assessment are prioritized, and a community classroom is created that promotes student participation, improves their academic performance, and manages the exchange of knowledge among them. From this perspective, SM is highly useful for creating academic groups to improve students' academic performance (Pulido et al, 2020). SM enhances students' learning activities and promotes group communication, so their utilization as learning and teaching tools by educational institutions should be encouraged (Merle and Freberg, 2016).…”

Approaching the Social Impact of Research Through a Literature Review

“…The results of this research highlight: publications with higher interest for citizens (Pulido et al, 2020; Kolahi & Khazaei, 2018), the low presence of research in social media (Garcovich & Adobes Martin, 2020; Pejić Bach et al, 2020; Viana Lora & Nel·lo Andreu, 2020) and in public policy documents (Tonetti, 2019; Bornmann et al, 2016), the positive but irrelevant correlation between scientific and social impact (Garcovich & Adobes Martin, 2020; Kolahi & Khazaei, 2018; Sedighi, 2020; Viana Lora & Nel·lo Andreu, 2020), the relationship between the online attention an academic paper receives and the policy citations it generates (Kale et al, 2017), medical research as the main area of study with the highest online presence (Cho, 2017), the use of Twitter at the end of the project rather than throughout the lifetime of the project (Pejić Bach et al, 2020), the poor accessibility of some tools in countries such as China (Garcovich & Adobes Martin, 2020) and the higher social media score of publications that reference social impact (Bornmann et al, 2019).…”

Twitter’s Messages about Hydrometeorological Events. A Study on the Social Impact of Climate Change

“…Many studies use data from social media to obtain significant results in diverse fields of study in different ways. Pulido and colleagues [25] highlight the way these uses can vary from research that makes use of social media to generate and disseminate certain phenomena while others implement it as eye-tracking methodology [26] to explore changes in behavioral patterns related to different ways to be exposed to social media. Additionally, other studies have contributed with scientific knowledge on the way the social impact of research or the social impact of a phenomenon can be captured [2].…”

“…It consists of developing algorithms to search for and select tweets/posts throughout the social networks, combining the use of developers' tools (such as Anaconda software) with social methods of investigation (coding, discourse analysis). In this investigation, the SISM methodology is implemented as social media analytics [25].…”