Elsevier

Public Relations Review

Volume 44, Issue 4, November 2018, Pages 562-573
Public Relations Review

Social media dialogues in a crisis: A mixed-methods approach to identifying publics on social media

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2018.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study uses mixed methods to analyze social media use in a crisis.

  • We examine crisis coping and emotional expression in social media engagement.

  • Results demonstrate dialogic clusters in the Paris and Barcelona terror attacks.

  • Analysis suggests ways to identify publics on social media.

  • This study shows that resilience and agenda-setting are factors in crisis coping.

Abstract

Despite the promise of social media to engender dialogue, the common approach to studying social media may prioritize monologue, whereby research considers the strategies organizations use in targeting publics, particularly in a crisis. This study uses a mixed-method approach to analyze dialogue in a crisis—semantic network analysis and content analysis. Specifically, this study examines the emotional expression and crisis coping behaviors on social media during two separate terror attacks: the Paris terror attacks in 2015 and the Barcelona terror attacks in 2017. Results demonstrate how publics may be identified and understood through semantic network analysis and content analysis. This study also shows the connection between emotions and coping, expanding the crisis communication literature in public relations, and suggests the need to consider agenda-setting and resilience in crisis communication research. Finally, we discuss this study’s implications for assuming a dialogic orientation in public relations.

Introduction

In November 2015 and August 2017, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks were carried out in Paris, France and Barcelona, Spain, respectively. Following news of the attacks, social media outlets were flooded with news reports, support, and outrage about the attacks, providing yet another illustration of social media as a virtual space where individuals congregate to make sense of events and discuss issues.

Much of the research in public relations positions social media as vehicles for driving dialogue (Watkins, 2017). This effort is achieved through the capacity of social media to enable self-expression and “simulate the sense of being there in the mediated environment” (Oh & Sundar, 2016; p. 186). In fact, social media have been lauded for their capability to connect individuals and publics via the interactivity of the media (Waters & Williams, 2011), rendering dialogue the principle construct for examining the behaviors of publics and stakeholders. In the context of a crisis, these behaviors often include emotional expression and efforts to make sense of, and cope with, crisis events.

The current study uses social media as a lens into the crisis response of two separate terrorist attacks—one in Paris in 2015 and the other in Barcelona in 2017—to identify the dialogues that define publics. In particular, this study uses a mixed-method approach that includes a quantitative semantic network analysis and a qualitative content analysis to analyze emotional expression and crisis coping activities in response to the terror attacks. Semantic network analysis, an innovative and emerging tool for research, classifies dialogue based on co-occurrences of themes throughout the network of discussions on a topic. Results from this study not only demonstrate how publics engage in self-expression during a crisis, fulfilling the dialogic mandate to understand publics on their own terms (Taylor & Kent, 2014), but they also suggest how publics might be identified through semantic network analysis. Furthermore, this study reveals new connections between emotions and crisis coping activities, and the need to place more emphasis on positive emotions and under-recognized crisis coping behaviors like agenda-setting and resilience in crisis communication research. Finally, this study suggests roles that social media publics fill in disseminating crisis information.

Section snippets

Literature review: the crisis experience in the digital age

The term ‘crisis’ is broadly considered a major and unexpected event that poses significant impact, including a “major toll” on human lives, property, and other economic and social factors of organizations and their publics (Coombs, 2012; Sellnow & Seeger, 2013). Though the impact may be a “radical change for good as well as bad” (Sellnow & Seeger, 2013), the common denominator of crisis definitions is that a crisis requires a recognizable impact. In some instances, this impact may be

Method

With the purpose of this study to understand the publics’ meaning-making efforts on social media during a crisis, including emotional expression and crisis coping, we approached this study using a mixed-method approach that would allow us to see both the sentiment and connection between publics on social media. Therefore, we conducted a semantic network analysis and a content analysis of social media posts on Twitter following two crisis events: the Paris terror attacks in 2015 and the

Results

This study employed a mixed-method approach to analyze the ways social media users responded to the terror attacks in Paris and Barcelona. We integrated semantic network analysis with content analysis to identify and confirm themes through the co-occurrence of words.

Discussion

Semantic network analysis stands to fulfill the promise of social media analysis in public relations research, enabling researchers and practitioners to take a Homo Dialogicus orientation (Kent & Taylor, 2016) to publics and identify the meaning-making experiences that assist in showing empathy and putting publics’ needs first. This study used semantic network analysis to examine the dialogues surrounding crisis response. While in many cases actual dialogue on social media may be dubious—posts

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