The relationship between race of shooter of mass shooting, number of victims, number of fatalities, and location of mass shootings on number of tweets posted by a gun advocacy group.
School Name
Spring Valley High School
Grade Level
10th Grade
Presentation Topic
Psychology and Sociology
Presentation Type
Non-Mentored
Oral Presentation Award
1st Place
Abstract
Twitter, a social networking site with over 330 million monthly users, allows the average person access to people around the world, as well as news about what is happening in different regions. In this project, a chosen gun advocacy group’s Twitter was analyzed to find correlation between the number of Tweets posted in a single day by the group based on the number of people killed or wounded in a mass shooting that day, the race of the perpetrator, and the location of the shooting. NCapture was used to collect the Tweets from the Twitter account, and the Mass Shootings Database and Stanford Geospatial Center provided the majority of the data for individual shootings. All independent variables were expected to have a negative linear impact on the number of Tweets. In the case of location, it was predicted that shootings occurring in the Southeast would cause a smaller amount of Tweets than shootings in other parts of the country. All confidence intervals were tested at α = 0.05. The claims that when x ≥ 5 were wounded would show a significant decrease in number of Tweets (p = 0.296), and a nonwhite shooter would cause a decrease in Tweets (p = 0.256) were not supported. The claims that less tweets would occur if ≥5 people were killed (p = 0.022) and that less Tweets would occur if the shooting took place in the Southeastern US (p = 0.002) was supported by the data.
Recommended Citation
Shytle, Elizabeth, "The relationship between race of shooter of mass shooting, number of victims, number of fatalities, and location of mass shootings on number of tweets posted by a gun advocacy group." (2018). South Carolina Junior Academy of Science. 202.
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/scjas/2018/all/202
Location
Neville 321
Start Date
4-14-2018 10:00 AM
Presentation Format
Oral and Written
The relationship between race of shooter of mass shooting, number of victims, number of fatalities, and location of mass shootings on number of tweets posted by a gun advocacy group.
Neville 321
Twitter, a social networking site with over 330 million monthly users, allows the average person access to people around the world, as well as news about what is happening in different regions. In this project, a chosen gun advocacy group’s Twitter was analyzed to find correlation between the number of Tweets posted in a single day by the group based on the number of people killed or wounded in a mass shooting that day, the race of the perpetrator, and the location of the shooting. NCapture was used to collect the Tweets from the Twitter account, and the Mass Shootings Database and Stanford Geospatial Center provided the majority of the data for individual shootings. All independent variables were expected to have a negative linear impact on the number of Tweets. In the case of location, it was predicted that shootings occurring in the Southeast would cause a smaller amount of Tweets than shootings in other parts of the country. All confidence intervals were tested at α = 0.05. The claims that when x ≥ 5 were wounded would show a significant decrease in number of Tweets (p = 0.296), and a nonwhite shooter would cause a decrease in Tweets (p = 0.256) were not supported. The claims that less tweets would occur if ≥5 people were killed (p = 0.022) and that less Tweets would occur if the shooting took place in the Southeastern US (p = 0.002) was supported by the data.
