Our sample represents a younger user base than our other analyses (i.e., compared to England, U.S., and India). Source: Talkwalker and authors’ calculations. We realize this English translation is not always entirely accurate, so we describe the Tweets in the main body of the paper. For the purposes of this paper, we have used the Twitter “translate” feature, which uses Google Translate so that the tweets are readable by an English-speaking audience. The tweets in our sample were almost entirely in Portuguese. To determine whether the Twitter conversation reflected major education news, we also looked at online news and news-related blog posts, such as G1., ElPaís, and CNN, which together made up the remaining 40 percent of the sample. Our analysis mostly looks at Twitter posts, which made up 60 percent of our sample (Figure 2). Volume of education conversation from September 2019 to October 2021
From Figure 1 below, you can see that the biggest spike in conversation occurred in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first shuttered schools in Brazil. Our sample encompasses 3.9 million results over the period from Septemto October 15, 2021. We recognize that the conversation on Twitter in Brazil is not representative of the entire social media conversation (8 percent of the population is on Twitter), so we triangulated our data with other online news sources wherever possible. The data included three social media sources: Twitter, online news, and blogs. Rebecca Winthrop, Adam Barton, Mahsa Ershadi, and Lauren Ziegler Thursday, September 30, 2021įor each period, we analyzed top themes and the most engaging posts within each theme to get a sense of the overall conversation around education. We categorized the data into three time periods: We used Talkwalker data to gather results and analyzed the content, author, source, and engagement of posts-observing, for example, how many times a tweet was shared or an article’s view count. We focused our query on the “average” social media user to better understand the everyday conversation around education versus that of a celebrity or influencer. To conduct the analysis, we developed a query for education and related words in the Talkwalker platform using a Boolean search. Parents’ voices are largely missing from the conversation. Overall, teachers were concerned about their own safety and the well-being of their students, with many going the extra mile to ensure their students could learn during the pandemic.
Earlier analyses reported on the findings of social listening in England and the United States, and a study of India will follow.
This report is the third in a series of social listening research from the Center for Universal Education (CUE). Project Coordinator and Research Assistant - Global Economy and Development, Center for Universal Education