A sentiment analysis of who participates, how and why, at social media sport websites. How differently men and women write about football
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2016-0050 |
| Published date | 10 October 2016 |
| Date | 10 October 2016 |
| Pages | 814-833 |
| Author | Marina Bagić Babac,Vedran Podobnik |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
A sentiment analysis of who
participates, how and why, at
social media sport websites
How differently men and women
write about football
Marina BagićBabac and Vedran Podobnik
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing,
University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Purpose –Due to an immense rise of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to
investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at football websites. Specifically, it
provides a sentiment analysis of user comments from gender perspective, i.e. how differently men and
women write about football. The analysis is based on user comments published on Facebook pages of
the top five 2015-2016 Premier League football clubs during the 1st and the 19th week of the season.
Design/methodology/approach –This analysis uses a data collection via social media website and
a sentiment analysis of the collected data.
Findings –Results show certain unexpected similarities in social media activities between male and
female football fans. A comparison of the user comments from Facebook pages of the top five
2015-2016 Premier League football clubs revealed that men and women similarly express hard
emotions such as anger or fear, while there is a significant difference in expressing soft emotions such
as joy or sadness.
Originality/value –This paper provides an original insight into qualitative content analysis of male
and female comments published at social media websites of the top five Premier League football clubs
during the 1st and the 19th week of the 2015-2016 season.
Keywords Social media, Facebook, Sentiment analysis, Football online consumption,
Gender perspectives
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
In recent years, public space of men’s football events has enlarged tremendously due to
an immense rise of social media, thus allowing fans to go beyond geographical barriers
in forming communities that could not otherwise exist (Guschwan, 2016), and to
become active contributors of ideas, improvements and extensions to the professional
producers of social media content (Ravindran and Garg, 2015).
Although the large majority of football fans are men, the number of female fans is
increasing, and there is a positive development in the attention paid to women (Selmer
and Sülzle, 2010). However, women fans are still perceived as “inauthentic supporters”
(Pope, 2014), and have to cope with a measure of sexism, but they can adopt the men’s
perspectives in order to be accepted as “authentic fans”, and can be as dedicated and
loyal as their male fellows (Mintert and Pfister, 2015). Moreover, men’s and women ’s
Online Information Review
Vol. 40 No. 6, 2016
pp. 814-833
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-02-2016-0050
Received 12 February 2016
Revised 3 May 2016
Accepted 6 May 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The authors acknowledge the support of the research project “Managing Trust and Coordinating
Interactions in Smart Networks of People, Machines and Organizations”, funded by the Croatian
Science Foundation under the number UIP-11-2013-8813.
814
OIR
40,6
pre-viewing (e.g. talking to others about the game, or reading about what might happen
in the game) and post-viewing behaviours (e.g. watching the game highlights on a news
broadcast) do not differ, nor does their motivation for watching televised sport (Gantz
and Wenner, 1995). A recent study of Gencer (2015) shows no differences between
female and male football fans in terms of motives and points of attachment, whereas
Sveinson and Hoeber (2015) suggest certain different perspectives on fandom from a
female viewpoint, e.g. from the feminist standpoint approach, an authentic fan does not
need to wear official, branded clothing or attend games in person, but does need to be
positive, supportive and enthusiastic.
Sport is a place where gender roles are created (Sparhawk et al., 1989), and gender
differences are usually explained by their production at the individual and structural
levels through practices, interactions or performative iterations, where masculinities
and femininities are “configurations of practice”(Connell, 2005). The dominant and
most idealized form of masculinity in any gender regime is “hegemonic masculinity”
which reinforces androcentric privilege, subjugating women, and discriminating
against gay men (Kian et al., 2011), whereas “emphasized femininity”practices are
nurturing, submissive and sexualized (Connell, 1987).
Although mainstream sport media is increasingly policed for homophobia and
sexism, the anonymity of the internet still permits hegemonic masculinity to flourish in
specific locations, without contestation (Kian et al., 2011). According to Jones (2008),
women respond to sexism and homophobia by expressing disgust at abuse, sometimes
redefining fandom to exclude abusers, by downplaying sexism, or by embracing
gender stereotypes, arguing that femininity was inconsistent with “authentic”fandom
and that abuse was a fundamental part of football. In addition, launching a women’s
fan group can also be interpreted as a means of opposition to the dominance of men
(Lenneis and Pfister, 2015). Women have also sought to contest this masculine domain
in part by adopting typically masculine linguistic practices of insult (McDowell, 2011),
since the sentiments expressed by football fans in the stories that they tell are often
intensified by the use of swear words (Byrne and Corney, 2014).
There are apparent phonological and pragmatic differences between male and female
language use in speech, informal writing and electronic messaging (Koppel et al., 2003),
e.g. when men recall their past experience, they tend to use positive words while women
use both positive as well as negativewords, however, for both men andwomen the most
salient emotion words present an antonymic pair sadness-happiness (Wang and Hsieh,
2007). Suchan approach is rarely used relating to footballfandom, except for the analyses
of abusive language (Byrne and Corney, 2014; Koppel et al., 2003; McDowell, 2011).
We propose to fill this gap by exploring social media text corpus to model, extract
and analyse the space of emotions at the intersection of natural language processing,
sentiment analysis and football fandom. In this paper, we present our results about
men’s football online consumption from gender perspective (actual sexual orientation
of individuals is beyond the scope of this study). Utilizing a significant amount of
fan-generated content from social media, we argue that in certain aspects men and
women feel the same about football. However, both the number of female football fans
and the amount of different soft emotional expressions about football still confirm the
stereotype that men, in general, enjoy football much more than women.
Our study is based on the idea that humans experience cross-cultural, universal
emotions, recognized by universal facial expressions, i.e. anger, disgust, fear, joy,
sadness and surprise (Ekman, 1992), which can be combined into soft (associated with
expressing vulnerability) and hard (associated with asserting power) emotions
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Social media
sport websites
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