Emotion + Affirmative Action
Find below a section from my current research paper on way emotion is expressed on social media in response to the 2023 court case overturning the use of Affirmative Action in college admissions. This paper is currently in progress under the guidance of Jasmine Kaduthodil, UCSD PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate.
Preview:
The purpose of this cross-sectional study is to describe TikTok content with the hashtag #affirmativeaction and investigate users’ reactions to the court case. The descriptive content analysis thus centered on 20 videos posted under the hashtag “affirmativeaction” on TikTok. The top-20-liked videos that included the hashtag #affirmativeaction were analyzed and coded for the presence of content categories. Additionally, the top 20 comments to each video were viewed and coded for with sentiment analysis to determine the main sentiment of the comment out of 3 options: positive, neutral, or negative. This study did not require research ethics approval because all TikTok data, including comments, was posted publicly with no expectation of privacy.
To conduct the descriptive content analysis, the qualitative data analysis platform Atlas.ti was utilized. In outlining this study, a qualitative analysis was determined to be more representative of the content and context of the videos and TikTok users compared to a solely quantitative, statistical analysis of the platform. In conducting this exploratory research, we allowed the video content itself to dictate the types of themes and codes that were used, enabling the comprehensive narratives presented in the videos to remain weaved in our analysis of them. In this way, the content and context remain inextricable from each other, ensuring as accurate research and analysis as possible. Many frameworks were also analyzed for their relevance and utility for this study, and a netnography was chosen as the most pertinent.