Gifted Education on Reddit: A Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Social media continues to be an ever-present part of people’s lives. One of the largest social media websites, Reddit has more than 430 million unique visitors monthly. What is unknown to scholars is how gifted education fits into this modern form of communication. In our research, we examined how gifted education is discussed over Reddit using text mining in combination with sentiment analysis. In addition, our research conditioned sentiment on variables such as self-disclosure, interest, and controversy. We found that, overall, discussion of giftedness was neutral in terms of sentiment and used common language across subreddits. We also found that the language used and distribution of sentiment were similar between self-disclosures and non-self-disclosures.