Roxane Cohen Silver discusses use of online data collection in research at national symposium

Roxane Cohen Silver, UC Irvine professor of psychology & social behavior, medicine and public health, gave a talk this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality & Social Psychology in Austin, Texas, on the use of online data collection and social media to conduct social science research. She has been utilizing online surveys to study how people cope with trauma in the aftermath of disaster. “The ability to collect data online after national events is far more efficient and useful than the prior way of collecting postdisaster data from representative samples, which was accomplished via telephone with ‘random digit dialing,’” Silver said. She has researched the effects of 9/11 and, more recently, the Boston Marathon bombings, linking repeated media exposure in the early aftermath of the latter to greater acute stress than having been at or near the marathon at the time.