A missing value approach to social network data: “Dislike” or “Nothing”?

Abstract

In recent years, the collection of data from social networks has increased sharply due to the diffusion of the internet and portable electronic devices. Data from social networks may represent a useful information source to investigate user opinions on web pages. Social network users can declare their preferences by clicking “Like” on a web page. This paper focuses on user’s “Likes” on social network pages by collecting the information given by users to social network pages with similar contents. Building on the user’s propensity to “Like” pages with analogous content, we suggest a procedure to assign a plausible opinion to pages that the user did not “Like.” Using this procedure, the absence of “Like” on a social network page is assigned with a negative (“Dislike”) or a neutral (“Nothing”) opinion. An application of the approach to data from social network pages on Italian television channels is shown.