A sentiment analysis of who participates, how and why, at social media sport websites: How differently men and women write about football
Abstract
Purpose
Due to an immense rise of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at football websites. Specifically, it provides a sentiment analysis of user comments from gender perspective, i.e. how differently men and women write about football. The analysis is based on user comments published on Facebook pages of the top five 2015-2016 Premier League football clubs during the 1st and the 19th week of the season.
Design/methodology/approach
This analysis uses a data collection via social media website and a sentiment analysis of the collected data.
Findings
Results show certain unexpected similarities in social media activities between male and female football fans. A comparison of the user comments from Facebook pages of the top five 2015-2016 Premier League football clubs revealed that men and women similarly express hard emotions such as anger or fear, while there is a significant difference in expressing soft emotions such as joy or sadness.
Originality/value
This paper provides an original insight into qualitative content analysis of male and female comments published at social media websites of the top five Premier League football clubs during the 1st and the 19th week of the 2015-2016 season.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of the research project “Managing Trust and Coordinating Interactions in Smart Networks of People, Machines and Organizations”, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation under the number UIP-11-2013-8813.
Citation
Bagić Babac, M. and Podobnik, V. (2016), "A sentiment analysis of who participates, how and why, at social media sport websites: How differently men and women write about football", Online Information Review, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 814-833. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2016-0050
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited