University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The language of vocational interests on social media

Du, Yan Yi Lance

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120547

Description

Title
The language of vocational interests on social media
Author(s)
Du, Yan Yi Lance
Issue Date
2023-04-28
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Drasgow, Fritz
Committee Member(s)
Roberts, Brent W
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • vocational interests
  • interest assessment
  • language analysis
  • social media
  • Facebook
Abstract
There is a burgeoning interest in using natural language to study vocational interests. However, little to no research has used social media language to predict users’ interests. The present study investigated how accurately language used on Facebook predicts individuals’ self-ratings on eight basic interests: Agriculture, Engineering, Human Resource, Life Science, Management/Administration, Mechanics/Electronics, Media, and Social Science. This study employed closed-vocabulary (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015) and open-vocabulary approaches (Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling) to analyze 3.2 million Facebook posts from 2,834 participants, who completed a 32-item basic interest measure (adapted from the Comprehensive Assessment of Basic Interests; CABIN; Su et al., 2019). Findings showed that the predictive accuracies of the linguistic models (mean r = .24; LDA topics) in assessing vocational interests are comparable to previous language research predicting personality traits (r = 0.27; Tay et al., 2020). Further, the present study revealed the unique language markers which characterize different basic interests. Together, the findings represent a novel advancement in vocational interest assessment. The results further suggest that automated language-based assessments can complement traditional self-report interest inventories to match people’s interests to their ideal occupations. Implications for research and applied settings were discussed.
Graduation Semester
2023-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2023 Yan Yi Lance Du

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