37th Annual Student Research Conference
Tweet People How You Want to be Tweeted: Why People Comment
Melody K. Zakarian* and Brian S. Burkhardt
Dr. Katie Judd, Faculty Mentor
The topic of interest for this research study was online commenting behavior. Of particular interest was what topics people commented on the most and people’s motivations for commenting on said posts about those topics. In an online survey, respondents were asked questions about commenting behavior and scored on two personality scales. The first was Need for Drama (NFD), which measures people’s involvement in drama and interpersonal conflict. The second was Monopoly on Truth (MOT), which is a measure of political extremity regardless of partisan leaning.
It was hypothesized that higher NFD and MOT scores would predict more frequent commenting, especially on controversial topics. Logistic ordinal regressions were run to evaluate how well NFD and MOT scores predicted commenting behaviors. This study provides insight into commenting behaviors of college students, but future research with more diverse samples could provide a more in-depth picture of the factors that influence commenting behavior.
Keywords: Social Media, Commenting, Drama, Political Extremity
Topic(s):Psychology
Presentation Type: Poster Presentation
Session: 1-7
Location: SUB Activities Room
Time: 4:30