As a sociologist focusing on social networks analysis and formal modeling, I am interested in how computational social science techniques can be used to address empirical problems in novel ways. Currently, I am working on an interdisciplinary project with colleagues from computer science, sociology, and public health to study adolescent cyberaggression, which is often hard to define. This spring, my collaborators and I will develop a smartphone application, which will capture electronic communications and answers to text queries in a sample of adolescent smartphone users. We expect to collect hundreds of thousands of messages and will employ content analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms to extract and classify cyberaggression content in these communications. We will also employ social network methods to examine the location and the diffusion of cyberaggression content in this network of adolescents.
