KidsFirst report on Social Media Analysis

The objective of the Kids First project is to gain new knowledge, but also de-
velop and implement a new protocol aimed at establishing a positive `pedagog-
ical sport climate' (PSC) that enlarges and utilizes the value of youth sports at
sport clubs. A sustainable consortium of experienced scientists and researchers
of dierent disciplines closely worked together with sport organizations and pol-
icy makers. Some of the sport organizations, also referred as clubs, which are
part of the consortium are: Bequick, Zwaluwen Utrecht, Upward, COV Desto
and SV Charlois.
This report, describes the main ndings and procedure of the social media
analysis which is part of Working Package 3 from the Kids First project. Since
this project is in partnership with four football and four hockey clubs in Zwolle,
Utrecht, Arnhem and Rotterdam, the social media data collection focused on
some of this clubs. Dierent types of data, with information from the sports
clubs, could have been collected from social media platforms such as Twitter,
Facebook or Instagram. However, only data from Twitter was collected since it
provides the most simple and easy to use API.
Besides, it is also easier to interpret and store, from the 3 original proposed
sources, since it has a limit of characters. Metadata from tweets was collected
from the Twitter Streaming API. The collection of data was made wiht the use
of specic words and/or hashtags, which refer to the aforementioned clubs.
The data obtained from tweets was analyzed with Sentiment Analysis and
Network Science algorithms. Then, the tweets sentiments related to sports clubs
was combined with social network analysis metrics to look for signs and possible
causes, of good or bad sentiment towards the clubs. The results are presented
and discussed in this report.