Keywords: Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies

This paper attempts to study the effect of increase in immigration as one of the most crucial structural changes that European countries have undergone in recent years. These changes make it particularly important to study attitudes toward immigration among host societies and the causes and consequences of such attitudes. In particular, the research questions we are addressing are following: What is the social media coverage of immigration and immigrants across European countries? How the macro-level social media coverage of immigration influence individuals’ attitude towards immigration? Research has explored the role of media in the formation of attitudes toward immigrants. However, there are only a few studies focusing on media coverage from a cross-cultural perspective with a large set of countries (Masso, Schlüter, Davidov, in print; van Klingeren, Boomgaarden, Vliegenthart, & de Vreese, 2015; Héricourt & Spielvogel, 2014). To the best of our knowledge there is no research about comparative study of social media coverage and its’ role in shaping attitudes towards immigration.
When studying the multilevel nature of immigration attitudes and the mediation of the attitudes by media technologies, the main methodological issue is the availability of comparative country-level data about media coverage of immigration (see e.g. Masso, Davidov, & Schlüter, in print). Social media offers a valuable source for working out a comparative method for measuring coverage of immigration across different European countries. We will incorporate big data analysis techniques after collecting data rich enough to represent each of the European countries. Manual qualitative method will be combined with automatized sentiment analysis. After working out a methodology for collecting data about social media coverage of immigration in European countries, we will calculate an aggregated macro-level index about the social media coverage regarding immigration across countries. We will combine this novel calculated macro-level index with the individual-level European Social Survey 2016 database. This individual-level database includes questions about attitudes toward immigration and Internet use across about 20 European countries. Working out a methodology for analyzing comparatively the social media coverage of immigration and combining these macro-level data with the individual database, enables to study further how does the macro-level social media coverage influence the individual attitudes toward immigration. In this presentation the possible methodological solutions as well as challenges will be reflected and preliminary results will be presented.


References
Héricourt, J., & Spielvogel, G. (2014). Beliefs, media exposure and policy preferences on immigration: evidence from Europe. Applied Economics, 46(2), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2013.844330
Masso, A., Davidov, E., & Schlüter, E. (n.d.). TV Exposure and Attitudes toward Immigration in Europe in a Cross-Country Perspective. Unpublished Article Draft.
van Klingeren, M., Boomgaarden, H. G., Vliegenthart, R., & de Vreese, C. H. (2015). Real World is Not Enough: The Media as an Additional Source of Negative Attitudes Toward Immigration, Comparing Denmark and the Netherlands. European Sociological Review, 31(3), 268–283. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcu089