Didn’t roger that: Social media message complexity and situational awareness of emergency responders

Nicolai Pogrebnyakov and Edgar Maldonado

International Journal of Information Management, 2018, vol. 40, issue C, 166-174

Abstract: This study investigates the role of social media in situational awareness in the emergency response domain. It builds a theoretical model to that effect, the first such effort to the best of our knowledge, and empirically investigates one of the components of the model, text complexity. The empirical analysis was performed on a dataset of 999,243 messages from 997 Facebook pages of US police departments in 2009—2016. Messages were classified into four categories based on their utilitarian or hedonic nature: emergency preparedness, emergency response, post-emergency and user engagement. Three measures of complexity were used, each capturing different aspects of text. Contrary to the hypothesis formulated in the study, messages in the post-emergency and the emergency response categories were found to be the most complex. With text complexity on social media being an underexplored area, these results suggest a need for an explicit study of the link between social media messages and situational awareness, and indicate a need for practitioners to revisit social media practices.

Keywords: Social media; Text complexity; Situational awareness; Emergency response (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840121730138X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ininma:v:40:y:2018:i:c:p:166-174

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Information Management is currently edited by Yogesh K. Dwivedi

More articles in International Journal of Information Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().