Flesch-Kincaid Measure as Proxy of Socio-Economic Status on Twitter: Comparing US Senator Writing to Internet Users

Abstract

Social media gives researchers an invaluable opportunity to gain insight into different facets of human life. Researchers put a great emphasis on categorizing the socioeconomic status (SES) of individuals to help predict various findings of interest. Forum uses, hashtags, and chatrooms are common tools of conversations grouping. Crowdsourcing involves gathering intelligence to group online user community based on common interest. This paper provides a mechanism to look at writings on social media and group them based on their academic background. The authors analyzed online forum posts from various geographical regions in the US and characterized the readability scores of users. Specifically, they collected 10,000 tweets from the members of US Senate and computed the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. Comparing the Senators' tweets to the ones from average internet users, they note 1) US Senators' readability based on their tweets rate is much higher, and 2) immense difference among average citizen's score compared to those of US Senators is attributed to the wide spectrum of academic attainment.