Abstract
PurposeSince the opening of China (aka, reform and opening-up), a great number of rural residents have migrated to large cities in the past 40 years. Such a one-way population inflow to urban areas introduces nontrivial social conflicts between urban natives and migrant workers. This study aims to investigate the most discussed topics about migrant workers on Sina Weibo along with the corresponding sentiment divergence.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory-descriptive-explanatory research methodology is employed. The study explores the main topics on migrant workers discussed in social media via manual annotation. Subsequently, guided LDA, a semi-supervised topic modeling approach, is applied to describe the overall topical landscape. Finally, the authors verify their theoretical predictions with respect to the sentiment divergence pattern for each topic, using regression analysis.FindingsThe study identifies three most discussed topics on migrant workers, namely wage default, employment support and urban/rural development. The regression analysis reveals different diffusion patterns contingent on the nature of each topic. In particular, this study finds a positive association between urban/rural development and the sentiment divergence, while wage default exhibits an opposite relationship with sentiment divergence.Originality/valueThe authors combine unique characteristics of social media with well-established theories of social identity and framing, which are applied more to off-line contexts, to study a unique phenomenon of migrant workers in China. From a practical perspective, the results provide implications for the governance of urbanization-related social conflicts.
Subject
Economics and Econometrics,Sociology and Political Science,Communication
Reference125 articles.
1. Measuring social media influencer index- insights from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram;Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services,2019
2. Bai, P. (2020), “Chinese-StopWords”, available at: https://github.com/baipengyan/Chinese-StopWords (accessed 13 February 2021).
3. Baidu (2019), “Baidu AI technical documents”, available at: https://ai.baidu.com/ai-doc/NLP (accessed 1 July 2020).
4. How noisy social media text, how different social media sources?,2013
5. Dynamic of primary school children's personal and social identity;Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences,2016
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献