Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 1

The Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills

Members:

Dalaniel, Rachel V.

Madrigal, Katrina T.

Magalang, Rachel Joy A.

Ogana, Rhenely

Torres, Charlotte V.

University of Makati
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 2

Introduction

Social networks are an extraordinarily important part of people’s digital lives, in part

because social networks have become much more than a way to connect about personal matters.

At the same time, we heard in various ways that people increasingly want to take more control

over social media, manage their time there, and improve the quality of what they see. Various

people expressed a sense of frustration, particularly with Twitter, for having too much information,

taking up too much of their time, and containing too much content that wasn’t trustworthy or

worthwhile.

In this generation, the students are exposed in Social Media, to be exact Twitter. That's

why it is hard for them to overcome problems and difficulties. Students now a days, are more

dependent on Twitter, tweeting their problem, instead of sharing to their relatives and friends.

We come up with this study to know if Twitter affects the Coping Skills of the students.

The impact of Twitter has most recently been highlighted by the current POTUS, whose

sphere of influence is no longer limited to personal and business enterprises. Through Twitter, he

has always had a global audience, but now the consequences of his communications as the

Commander in Chief, could potentially have a global impact; however, the literature shows that

we could realistically expect very little effect. The benefits may seem endless when considering

the power of a free communication tool being implemented by low-budget establishments such as

educational institutions and non-profit organizations. However, the literature proves Twitter to be

an ineffective communication tool. Online literature relating to Twitter focuses heavily on the

analytic data that can be leeched from the platform. Twitter as a communication tool has been

revolutionary; unlike other social media platforms, there is no requirement to ‘Friend’ or ‘Follow’
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 3

a user to see the content they have created. As a result of this, harvesting data for analysis is easier

than with other platforms.

Aforementioned links between social media use and positive outcomes may be explained

by conceptualizing social media use as a form of coping through social support seeking. Coping

refers to the specific way, both behavioral and psychological, in which individuals master, tolerate,

reduce, or minimize stressful events (Taylor, 1998). The methods with which individuals cope

with life stressors have long been of interest in psychological research. While many styles of

coping have been operationalized and studied, it is important to note that coping changes over time

with changing situational contexts (Lazarus, 1993). Therefore, a particular coping style may be

adaptive in one context, but not in another.

The coping mechanisms are commonly termed coping strategies or coping skills.

The term coping generally refers to adaptive coping strategies. That is strategies which reduce

stress. In contrast, other coping strategies may be coined as maladaptive, if they increase stress.

Maladaptive coping is therefore also described, when looking at the outcome, as non-coping.

Furthermore, the term coping generally refers to reactive coping, i.e. the coping response which

follows the stressor. (Lazarus,1991)

There are two coping strategies: active coping and avoidant coping. Individuals often use

both of these strategies, sometimes in combination, to deal with stressful events (Folkman &

Lazarus, 1980). Active coping entails problem solving, seeking support, and attempts at changing

one's current situation, while avoidant coping entails denial, drawing into oneself, and engaging

in potentially harmful activities such as substance use. Research has found that avoidant coping

strategies may be effective short-term but are maladaptive overall (Suls & Fletcher, 1985).
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 4

The point estimates of the effects are larger in magnitude in the bottom row, and both the

Feelings and Rules treatments 25 have significant effects in the 2-7 day time period, even as the

reduced sample size results in larger standard errors. The overall inferences from the negative

binomial regressions run in the body of the text are robust to using OLS. The models disagree

about whether the effects of the Feelings and Rules treatments persist for the 15-28 day time

period;

Background of the study

Twitter can be considered as one of the contemporary and popular online social networks.

As a micro-blogging system, it is relevant in both private and public communication spheres.

Twitter is used for purposes such as updating current status, initiating conversations, endorsing

tweet content, promoting products and even for spamming (Benevenuto, Magno, Rodrigues, &

Almeida, 2010). The success of a social media platform lies in its ability to attract people from

different domains and geographic locations Academicians and researchers from the scientific

community are also interested in social media due to its various benefits (Sugimoto, Work,

Larivière, & Haustein, 2016). Scholars have cited information dissemination as a major benefit of

using Twitter (Letierce, Passant, Breslin, & Decker, 2010). It has been observed that tweets can

help in predicting citations to a certain extent (Eysenbach, 2011).

The study focuses on knowing the effect of twitter on coping skills of 1st year BS Nursing

students in University of Makati. This study simply let the students tweet their problems and see

if their coping mechanism is high or not depending on the test result during the pre – test and

posttest using the Big Five Personality Test (OCEAN Test) by Costa and McCrae.
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 5

A study conducted by Kwak, Lee, Park and Moon (2010), set out to determine whether

Twitter is ‘Social Network or a News Media’ and to define the power of Twitter ‘as a new medium

of information sharing’ (591). The authors claim that ‘this work is the first quantitative study on

the entire Twittersphere’ (591). Analysis of current data would provide an interesting comparison.

Kwak et al. investigate the occurrence of homophily, being ‘a tendency that a contact between

similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people’ (594).

Several studies have found that individuals can use social media networking sites as a

means of active coping for seeking social support and problem solving. Another study analyzed

2,099 Twitter messages during the 2011 European Escherichia coli outbreak in Spain and found

that users tweeted about the crisis during periods of uncertainty as a form of social coping to

express acceptance and positive adaption to the crisis (Gaspar et al., 2014).

Gaspar (2014) suggests that social media has been used as a coping strategy in college

students and adults, no studies have directly examined whether adolescents describe social media

use as a coping mechanism.

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Research Paradigm

1st Year Students of BS

Nursing in University of
Makati
A.Y 2019-2020

PRE - TEST

Experimental Group A Controlled Group B

Non-twitter Non-twitter

Treatment
POST – TEST

Coping Skills

There is a Significant
Difference
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Theoretical Framework

The coping theory is a vast area of study that is classified into two independent parameters:

1. Focus-oriented theories (trait and state).

2. Approach-oriented theories (micro-analytic and macro-analytic).

The focus-oriented state and trait theories of coping recognize a person’s internal resources and

mental capacities for evaluating how well he can adapt to a situation. On the other hand, the

approach-oriented micro and macro analytic coping theories revolve around how concrete or

abstract the coping mechanisms are (Carver, 1989).

Statement of the Problem

This study aims to determine the effect of twitter on coping skills of the 1st year Nursing students

in University of Makati for academic year 2019-2020.

The researcher wants to answer the following questions below:

1. Is there an effect on days of intervention to the coping skills of students?

2. What is the effect of venting out their problems through tweeting?

3. Is there a significant difference to the result of the treatment in pretest and posttest?

Hypothesis

Null Hypothesis: There is no significant difference between twitter and coping skills.
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Scope and Delimitation

The researcher focuses on the effect of twitter on coping skills of the 1 st year BS Nursing

Students in University of Makati. The aspects look into the purpose of twitter whether it contributes

to the level of coping mechanism or not. This study confirms the coping skills of Nursing students

wherein there are two groups: One group will use twitter to vent out and the other group will use

diary to vent out their problems.

The study was limited in the participants because 1st year Nursing students only are

required to participate on our research.

Significance of the Problem

The result of the study will help group of people to know the influence of twitter on level

of coping skills in terms of the population. Basically, the group of people will particularly benefit

from this study.

Teachers: This study will provide additional knowledge regarding to the effect of twitter

on coping skills that they can use in their students and can be their basis if the student is acting

strange.

Parents. This study will be the eye-opener because they will be aware that their

sons/daughters has a problem and they will be the one who can help to solve it.
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 9

Review of Related Literature and Studies

Foreign Literature

Twitter

Twitter started in 2006, since then it has become an international social phenomenon that

has grown to an estimated 100 million users generating more than 200 million tweets a day. (“You

are what you tweet”, 2015, p.8)

Twitter is a “network of networks” that allows users to access information, opinions and

other daily events from around the world. It is a real – time information source used by millions

of individuals, organizations and businesses to share and highlight social media content and

enhance opportunity. (“You are what you tweet”, 2015, p.9)

Twitter and 'tweeting' is about broadcasting daily short burst messages to the world, with

the hope that your messages are useful and interesting to someone. In other words, microblogging.

Conversely, Twitter is also about discovering interesting people online and following their burst

messages for as long as they are interesting. (Gil, 2017)

Twitter is used to connect people with the same interests. As the Twitter homepage

suggests, the social platform can be used to, “Connect with your friends — and other fascinating

people. Get in-the-moment updates on the things that interest (Sturk, 2017)

Freedom of Expression

The importance of social media is it makes available freedom of expression and speech.

Freedom of expression is the human right to express opinion anywhere or anytime without any

concern and fear of constraints or punishments. People may have the greatest sense of freedom of
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expression when using social network sites more than their ability to freely express themselves in

reality as a result of restrictions (Noaman, 2015)

On Twitter, people are welcome to share any information. There is no absence of

discussion about any issue. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall

include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without

interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. (“Universal declaration of human

rights”, Right to freedom of opinion and expression Article 19)

Freedom of expression and freedom of opinion are among the most fundamental freedoms

and rights in society. Freedom of opinion is unlimited, while the right to freely express one’s view

can be restricted and must be exercised with particular responsibility out of consideration for the

rights and freedoms of others. The free word can cause harm by, for instance, by being perceived

as being offensive, inciting discrimination or acts of violence, or disclosing information that has

negative consequences either for individuals or society as a whole. In other words, freedom of

expression has certain limitations. (Rhattigheter, n.d.)

Effects

Recently, some researchers have associated online social networking with several

psychiatric disorders, including depressive symptoms, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Since social

networks are a relatively new phenomenon, many questions regarding their potential impact on

mental health remain unanswered. On the other hand, due to the popularity of these online services

in the general population, any future confirmed connection between them and psychiatric diseases

would pose a serious public health concern. (Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2014, pp. 652–657.)
Effect of Twitter on Coping Skills 1
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There are negative and positives, first of the use of freedom of expression sometimes if

not, most of the time is abused. Normal socialization shifts from having a healthy and opinionated

conversation to a more forceful and in your face persuasion. On the other hand, a positive input on

this would be that society as a whole is closer to each other. Close enough to feel and respect each

other and overall having a more empathetic belief in other people’s point of views. (Hernandez,

2017)

Local Literature

People use social media more actively during the times of calamities and problems in life

[8]. And among the different social media platforms, Twitter is the leading social media service

wherein, it becomes more commonly used by the individuals to keep them updated about the news

involving disasters [7].

Uses and Gratification Theory aims to know how people use a particular medium to meet

their needs and attain satisfaction [10]. One assumption is that people tend to choose their own

media depending on the objective they want to achieve. The use of Twitter account of the local

government unit is very significant for quick dissemination of information. Former Manila City

Mayor Alfredo Lim tweeted his announcements regarding typhoon updates and this practice is

adopted by the newly elected City Mayor, Joseph Estrada. It is also important that the public is

responding to the information the government agency disseminates.

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Foreign Literature

Based on Rogers and Yassin (2003), it is important for students to develop different coping

strategies in order to encounter and manage stressful conditions. If not handled well, the stressors

that originated from financial problems, sleep deprivation, societal activities and many more can

affect student’s ability to perform.

Coping skills are factors that determine how a person responds to a task and how well they

succeed (Pajares, 2002). When an individual has a sense of control over the stressful situation they

are more likely to respond to the situation with confidence (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1992).

Coping theorists have generally categorized coping strategies under three groups: a)

strategies focused on resolving the problem; b) strategies used to alleviate the emotions triggered

by the situation; and c) strategies involving social support (Dalton & Pakenham, 2002). Apart

from these three categories, theorists such as Billings and Moos (1981), along with Pearlin and

Schooler (1978), have constructed alternative models by classifying the coping strategies in

accordance with the approach-avoidance dichotomy.

At a more practical level, Frydenberg and Lewis' (1993, 1996) model offers an

assessment of coping strategies by separating them into productive, nonproductive and reference

to others groupings. Productive coping strategies entail "reflecting on and tackling the problem"

(Frydenberg & Lewis, 1996, p. 234), somewhat similar to problem-focused strategies described

by other theorists. In contrast, nonproductive coping strategies address the regulation of feelings,

which are focused on the regulation of feelings, as in the case of the emotion-focused strategies
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(Frydenberg & Lewis, 1996, p. 234). The final category, reference to others coping strategies,

involves enlisting the help of others, which are similar to the social support strategies.

Local Literature

In the Philippine context, Filipinos keep on receiving compliments about how resilient they

are because they are all able to cope with very stressful situations such as calamity and poverty

(Tan, 2006). The country was even ranked as the 20th happiest RESEARCH ARTICLE 112 J.R.

Rilveria country in the world according to the Happy Planet Index (Jeffrey, Wheatley, & Abdallah,

2016) despite socio-economic difficulties. With this in mind, it is very interesting to look at how

third-world country citizens like Filipinos cope with stress and identify which coping strategies

are dominantly used when dealing with and managing stressful life experiences. The development

of this scale revolved around the Filipinos’ general ways of coping and specific coping behaviors

Foreign and Local Studies

Several studies have been made to try and discover or filter information from the massive volume

of tweets on Twitter as well as its userbase. Yamaguchi et al [29] attempted to tag users based on

what topics they are more likely to tweet about using the information from their Twitter lists.

Another study ranked users according to their authority or influence on other users, based on how

information flows between users [30]. Some interesting results also show that even if a Twitter

user has Understanding the Behavior of Filipino Twitter Users during Disaster John Boaz Lee,

Michael Ybañez, Marlene M. De Leon, and Ma. Regina E. Estuar T GSTF International Journal

on Computing (JoC), Vol. 3 No. 2, July 2013 ©The Author(s) 2013. These studies generally utilize
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followers-followed relationships and retweets in order to determine authority or influence. It is

also possible to get very useful information about the tweets, and the topics or events discussed in

the tweets, rather than the users. Live streams of tweets can be clustered together, and mapped to

actual real-world events in real-time [1]. Other approaches to information gathering are more

geared towards disaster events: particle filters that consider each Twitter user as a sensor are able

to analyze tweets in real time in order to detect whether an earthquake is currently happening [22].

This algorithm was integrated into an earthquake reporting system in Japan that e-mails registered

users when the Twitter feed indicates that an earthquake is occurring, with 96% of at least intensity

3 earthquakes being detected correctly [22].

There are many studies that attempt to examine online social networks such as Twitter and

Facebook by using graphs to model. The use of graphs may allow researchers to explore other

problems and approaches to solving these problems. An example of a graph-based problem is

community detection, which attempts to identify groups of nodes that are densely connected to

one another and less densely connected to the rest of the network [7], [16], and there are clustering

methods used to detect communities in social networks.

This is especially useful in recommender systems for social networks that predict which

other users a specific user will “befriend.” Graphs allow influence propagation in a real world

network to be studied: advisor-advisee relationships in a bibliographic network can be identified

through influence models [28], and models of topic-level influence of one node on another can

predict user behavior for social networks like Twitter and Digg [14]. Clustering has also been
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studied in the context of networks, and has been used to generate good clustering information in

the network.

Social media, defined as “the many relatively inexpensive and widely accessible electronic

tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on a 8 common effort, or

build relationships” (Jue, et al. 2010:4 as cited in Murthy, 2013, p. 8), includes websites like

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare or social networking sites. Social networking sites

focus on relationships like friend groups on Facebook, while social media is “broadcast-based and

encourages the accumulation of more and more followers who are aware of a user’s published

content” (Murthy, 2013, p. 8). In recent years, social media has gained prominence as a means of

informing, educating, entertaining and persuading. One can follow news events both local and

international, get updated on celebrities’ lives, learn a new skill, communicate with friends, and

even decide which product to buy--all by using social media. Thus, it comes as no surprise that

more and more people are going online and spending time on social media. Growth in social media

use is visible and exponential.

A study by Universal McCann in 2008 calculated internet penetration in the Philippines to

be 15.4% (Universal McCann, 2008, p. 7). According to statistics from We Are Social (as cited in

Castro, 2015, slides 10 & 13), as of January 2014 the Philippines had a 36% internet penetration

with 37,602,976 users and 101% mobile subscription penetration, with 106,987,098 active mobile

subscriptions. In the span of just a year, internet penetration increased to 44% or 44.2 million users;

and mobile subscription penetration at 114% or 114.6 million connections. Also, as of January

2015 there were 40 million active social media accounts (a penetration of 40%) and 32 million
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active mobile social accounts (a penetration of 32%). With that, the Philippines has, time and

again, been touted the social media capital and even selfie capital of the world.

Relevance of the study

The literatures and studies are relevant to present the study wherein the coping mechanism

are further discussed and give support to the present study to form an idea or concrete evidences.

Information coming from the literatures and studies will help to answer the research questions.

The gathered information on online sources, journals and books serves as support

evidences and answer the specific research questions. Based on the literatures and studies, most of

the authors discussed that many people encounter many problems and yet, it’s so hard to them to

cope up with it.

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Definition of Terms

In this research, the terms below was used to give the exact definition.

Twitter - Is a free social networking microblogging service that allows registered members to

broadcast short posts called tweets

Intervention - Are actions performed to bring about change in people

Maladaptive- not providing adequate or appropriate adjustment to the environment or situation.

Aforementioned - denoting a thing or person previously mentioned.

Theory- Set of beliefs or principles that might not be proven yet

Parameter- A numerical or other measurable factor forming one of a set that defines a system or

sets the conditions of its operation.

Cope- To deal with and attempt to overcome problems and difficulties

Micro-blogging – a web service that allows the subscriber to broadcast short messages to other

subscribers of the service.

Journals – a daily record of news and events of a personal nature; a diary.