Cross-Cultural Studies Using Social Networks Data

Abstract

With the widespread access of people to the Internet and the increasing usage of social networks in all nations, social networks have become a new source to study cultural similarities and differences. We identified major issues in traditional methods of data collection in cross-cultural studies: difficulty in access to people from many nations, limited number of samples, negative effects of translation, positive self-enhancement illusion, and a few unreported problems. These issues are either causing difficulty to perform a cross-cultural study or have negative impacts on the validity of the final results. In this paper, we propose a framework that aims to calculate cultural distance among several countries using the information and cultural features extracted from social networks. To this aim, the framework estimates the distribution of news-oriented tweets for each nation and computes the cultural distance from these sets of distributions. Based on a sample composed of more than 17 million tweets from late 2017, our framework calculated cultural distance between 22 countries. Our results show a positive correlation between cultural distances computed by our framework and distances computed by Hofstede’s cultural scores and also identified connections between some of the cultural features.