Can we use Instagram to estimate happiness at universities?

OK.

Lotte van Rijswijk, writing for Resume.io, used Instagram photos to determine the happiest college in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Here is the Top 20 list for the US. If you go to the website, you can see similar summaries for the UK and Australian data and an interactive table containing all of the data.

Here are some ideas for using it in class:

1. This methodology is pretty interesting. She used smiling recognition software and pictures from Instagram to measure happiness. I think this study would pair well with this study about using software to evaluate smiles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617734315

https://resume.io/blog/the-happiest-schools-in-the-us-uk-and-australia

2. Ask your student to consider the sampling error that may result from using Instagram data for any research. For example, are photos on Insta representative of human experiences? Is it reasonable to gather a sample of college-aged students using Insta?

3. The ranking system is a fine example of ordinal data. You can see that clearly since the percentage smiling is listed right next to the rank order.

4. Ask your student to generate research hypotheses that could be answered with facial recognition software.

5. Here is the data, with the US, UK, and Australia data. In addition to the data from the website (rank, college, location, percent smiling), I added a column for the country. Mostly, I did this so you can use it as an example when you teach ANOVA.

Comments

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