About the Content Analysis
The analyses of Twitter conversations employed media research methods that combined Pew Research’s content analysis rules with computer coding software developed by Crimson Hexagon.
Crimson Hexagon is a software platform that identifies statistical patterns in words used in online texts. Researchers enter key terms using Boolean search logic so the software can identify relevant material to analyze. Pew Research draws its analysis sample from several million blogs and all public Twitter posts. Then a researcher trains the software to classify documents using examples from those collected posts. Finally, the software classifies the rest of the online content according to the patterns derived during the training.
Full individual methodologies, including the search terms used to identify relevant tweets, are available within each report.