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Sexuality Research and Social Policy

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06-10-2018

#sendeanlat (#tellyourstory): Text Analyses of Tweets About Sexual Assault Experiences

Authors: Elif G. Ikizer, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Ryan L. Boyd

Published in: Sexuality Research and Social Policy | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

On 11 February 2015, a 20-year-old university student, Ozgecan Aslan, was violently murdered in an attempted rape in Mersin, southern Turkey. This event led to a mass Twitter protest in the country. Women across the country started sharing the hashtag #sendeanlat (“#tellyourstory” in English). In the current exploratory study, 164,279 original tweets were analyzed using the text analytic approach called the Meaning Extraction Method. Results revealed the key themes of reactions to victim blaming, honor culture/namus, assault experiences, social media, and women’s responsibility. Policy, media, and mental-health-related implications and future research directions are discussed.

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We observed that, although we excluded the retweets, there were some impactful tweets that individuals decided to partially copy. For example, a tweet could be copied with similar/exact wording yet different punctuation. Given the size of the current dataset, it is unlikely that such tweets will impact the results. Furthermore, it is to the users’ discretion to copy a tweet as their own without retweeting. It would also be not logistically feasible to separate such tweets given the amount of data we have. Furthermore, it would be an ambiguous methodological cutoff to exclude tweets that repeat the same words with slight changes, and perhaps counter-productive towards the purpose of studying broad social movements.

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Title: #sendeanlat (#tellyourstory): Text Analyses of Tweets About Sexual Assault Experiences
Authors: Elif G. Ikizer
Nairán Ramírez-Esparza
Ryan L. Boyd
Publication date: 06-10-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Sexuality Research and Social Policy / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1868-9884
Electronic ISSN: 1553-6610
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-018-0358-5

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