Linux Journal
An unobtrusive behavioral model of "gross national happiness"
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The personality of popular facebook users
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
The spread of emotion via facebook
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Traveling trends: social butterflies or frequent fliers?
Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks
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Social media sites have been used to track the expression of emotion words across nations. A question left unexplored is whether, at a similar scale, these sites can be used to collect reliable well-being data. To tackle this question, we collect Satisfaction With Life (SWL) test results from a Facebook application and show that aggregate country-level results significantly vary across twelve rich countries and strongly correlate with official well-being scores. To then show that collecting data on Facebook offers an informative look at the sociology of well-being, we study the impact of (un)happiness on the twelve countries by relating the test results on Facebook to reputable international indicators of social and health problems. We find that countries where happiness is lower have increased problems across the board: decreasing well-being is associated with increasing homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, and anxiety. In addition to offering these findings, this work hints at the conditions under which social media could be used for data-driven social science research.