Facebook Status Updates - a Content Analysis free essay sample

Motivation When analyzing Facebook posts or messages from any other microblogging platform, you can take into account plenty of different aspects. On the one hand you can investigate correlations between posts and demographical aspects of the user, the duration of status updates, intentions of the user to share certain information, simply the content of the post and many more. Since in former research most studies concentrated only on one of these aspects, the connection between two or more of them have not yet been examined. Are, for example, certain topics often mentioned with a certain emotion or intention? Or which topics are the ones people talk negatively about or complain about? In this study the dimensions topic, intention, emotion as well as other components will be put in a relationship. Moreover most of the studies were based on automatic word and content notification software. Our analysis is based on manual work. We will write a custom essay sample on Facebook Status Updates a Content Analysis or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Often times the real intention or emotional component can only be understood by manually analyzing a Facebook post since many people might use rhetorical expressions, dialects or cryptical messages which cannot be understood by a program. Hence, this could give this study a greater extent of accuracy. Additionally, none of the former research was based only on German status updates what gives the opportunity to draw a comparison between cultures, countries or languages in future studies. Grounded Theory For this study, data analyzing concepts of grounded theory are used. Grounded Theory was introduced in 1967 by Amseln Strauss and Barney Glaser. According o Strauss and Glaser, Grounded Theory is a â€Å"systematic, qualitative process used to generate a theory that explains, at a broad conceptual level, a process, an action, or interaction about a substantive topic† (Creswell, 2002, p 439) To develop a theory out of qualitative data, this approach uses a â€Å"systematic set of processes to develop an inductively derived Grounded Theory about a phenomenon† (Strauss, Corbin, 1990, p24). The three basic elements of Grounded Theory are concepts, categories and propositions. They are part of the data analyzi ng process of Grounded Theory. In this paper we focus only on these three elements. In the next section, we will describe the process of coding based on the provided dataset and present our results of the analyzed data. Case study We analyzed a dataset consisting of 1200 status updates from Facebook in order to give a conclusion about what people talk about on Facebook. Therefore, we conceptualized and analyzed the data like in the following. Developing a Coding Framework According to Strauss and Corbin coding â€Å"†¦represents the operation by which data are broken down, conceptualized, and put back together in new ways. It is the central process by which theories are built from data. † (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, p. 57) To make an analysis feasible, we developed a general coding framework that can be applied on all Facebook status updates. As several people worked on this framework, comparing results was important to receive a consistent list. The development of our coding framework consists of three steps: Developing codes, conceptualization, and developing categorizations. In the following, we elaborate on these three steps. Developing codes. The provided dataset consists of 1200 status updates of German Facebook users. For a start we performed open coding by asking simple questions like: * What is the status update about? * Is a location mentioned? * Is it positive or negative etc. We applied these questions on the first 100 status updates. When we read a post for the first time, we coded it with all associated keywords we could think of. As a result, we received an unsystematic list of keywords that represented our list of codes. Conceptualization. The unsystematic list of codes was used to identify concepts and categories. Comparing the list of codes from each coder leaded us to a more systematic first coding list. Several codes were then summarized under a common name. For example, work and study includes education, school, exam, university, programming, studying, and work. Emotions like afraid, fearing, angry, hating, bothered and stressed were conceptualized to disliking/discomfort. The developed new coding list now consists of several codes or concepts which have several meanings. Developing Categorizations. The final step that concludes the development of our coding framework is to assign categories for each code. Work and study for example fits into the category â€Å"Topic†, disliking/discomfort fits in the category â€Å"Emotion†. Finally we identified eight categories. Any category consists of several concepts that again consist of several meanings. We identified the following categories: Topic, Emotion, Intention, Time, Location, Speech, Valence and Process. Topic, Emotion, Location and the connected codes are self-explanatory. For Time we identified besides past, present and future, the components time pressure, time consuming, countdown, time wasting and long time. Intention explains why a user updates his or hers status update. For example expressing an opinion about something can be used as a code for intention.

The Physics of a Car Collision

The Physics of a Car Collision During a car crash, energy is transferred from the vehicle to whatever it hits, be it another vehicle or a stationary object. This transfer of energy, depending on variables that alter states of motion, can cause injuries and damage cars and property. The object that was struck will either absorb the energy thrust upon it or possibly transfer that energy back to the vehicle that struck it. Focusing on the distinction between  force  and  energy  can help explain the physics involved. Force: Colliding With a Wall Car crashes are clear examples of how Newtons Laws of Motion work. His first law of motion, also referred to as the law of inertia, asserts that an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force acts upon it. Conversely, if an object is at rest, it will remain at rest until an unbalanced force acts upon it.   Consider a situation in which car A collides with a static, unbreakable wall. The situation begins with car A traveling at a velocity (v) and, upon colliding with the wall, ending with a velocity of 0. The force of this situation is defined by Newtons second law of motion, which uses the equation of force equals mass times acceleration. In this case, the acceleration is (v - 0)/t, where t is whatever time it takes car A to come to a stop. The car exerts this force in the direction of the wall, but the wall, which is static and unbreakable, exerts an equal force back on the car, per Newtons third law of motion. This equal force is what causes cars to accordion up during collisions. Its important to note that this is an idealized model. In the case of car A, if it slams into the wall and comes to an immediate stop, that would be a perfectly inelastic collision. Since the wall doesnt break or move at all, the full force of the car into the wall has to go somewhere. Either the wall is so massive that it accelerates, or moves an imperceptible amount, or it doesnt move at all, in which case the force of the collision acts on the car and the entire planet, the latter of which is, obviously, so massive that the effects are negligible. Force: Colliding With a Car In a situation where car B collides with car C, we have different force considerations. Assuming that car B and car C are complete mirrors of each other (again, this is a highly idealized situation), they would collide with each other going at precisely the same speed but in opposite directions. From conservation of momentum, we know that they must both come to rest. The mass is the same, therefore, the force experienced by car B and car C is identical, and also identical to that acting on the car in case A in the previous example. This explains the force of the collision, but there is a second part of the question: the energy within the collision. Energy Force is a vector quantity while kinetic energy is a scalar quantity, calculated with the formula K 0.5mv2. In the second situation above, each car has kinetic energy K directly before the collision. At the end of the collision, both cars are at rest, and the total kinetic energy of the system is 0. Since these are inelastic collisions, the kinetic energy is not conserved, but total energy is always conserved, so the kinetic energy lost in the collision has to convert into some other form, such as heat, sound, etc. In the first example where only one car is moving, the energy released during the collision is K. In the second example, however, two are cars moving, so the total energy released during the collision is 2K. So the crash in case B is clearly more energetic than the case A crash. From Cars to Particles Consider the major differences between the two situations. At the quantum level of particles, energy and matter can basically swap between states. The physics of a car collision will never, no matter how energetic, emit a completely new car. The car would experience exactly the same force in both cases. The only force that acts on the car is the sudden deceleration from v to 0 velocity in a brief period of time, due to the collision with another object. However, when viewing the total system, the collision in the situation with two cars releases twice as much energy as the collision with a wall. Its louder, hotter, and likely messier. In all likelihood, the cars have fused into each other, pieces flying off in random directions. This is why physicists accelerate particles in a collider to study high-energy physics. The act of colliding two beams of particles is useful because in particle collisions you dont really care about the force of the particles (which you never really measure); you care instead about the energy of the particles. A particle accelerator speeds up particles but does so with a very real speed limitation dictated by the speed of light barrier from Einsteins theory of relativity. To squeeze some extra energy out of the collisions, instead of colliding a beam of near-light-speed particles with a stationary object, its better to collide it with another beam of near-light-speed particles going the opposite direction. From the particles standpoint, they dont so much shatter more, but when the two particles collide, more energy is released. In collisions of particles, this energy can take the form of other particles, and the more energy you pull out of the collision, the more exotic the particles are.