Journal of Computational Social Science最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic meant that, in 2020, students in England were unable to sit their examinations and instead received predicted grades, or "centre assessment grades" (CAGs), from their teachers to allow them to progress. Using the Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) dataset for students from 2018 to 2020, this study treats the use of CAGs as a natural experiment for causally understanding how teacher judgements of academic ability may be biased according to the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of their students. A variety of machine learning models were trained on the 2018-19 data and then used to generate predictions for what the 2020 students were likely to have received had their examinations taken place as usual. The differences between these predictions and the CAGs that students received were calculated and then averaged across students' different characteristics, revealing what the treatment effects of the use of CAGs were likely to have been for different types of students. No evidence of absolute negative bias against students of any demographic or socio-economic characteristic was found, with all groups of students having received higher CAGs than the grades they were likely to have received had they sat their examinations. Some evidence for relative bias was found, with consistent, but insubstantial differences being observed in the treatment effects of certain groups. However, when higher-order interactions of student characteristics were considered, these differences became more substantial. Intersectional perspectives which emphasise interactions and sub-group differences should be used more widely within quantitative educational equalities research.

In this article, we conduct a comparative analysis of web search behaviors in Switzerland and Germany. For this aim, we rely on a combination of web tracking data and survey data collected over a period of 2 months from users in Germany (n = 558) and Switzerland (n = 563). We find that web search accounts for 13% of all desktop browsing, with the share being higher in Switzerland than in Germany. In over 50% of cases users clicked on the first search result, with over 97% of all clicks being made on the first page of search outputs. Most users rely on Google when conducting searches, with some differences observed in users' preferences for other engines across demographic groups. Further, we observe differences in the temporal patterns of web search use between women and men, marking the necessity of disaggregating data by gender in observational studies regarding online information seeking behaviors. Our findings highlight the contextual differences in web search behavior across countries and demographic groups that should be taken into account when examining search behavior and the potential effects of web search result quality on societies and individuals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a surge of misinformation on social media which covered a wide range of different topics and contained many competing narratives, including conspiracy theories. To study such conspiracy theories, we created a dataset of 3495 tweets with manual labeling of the stance of each tweet w.r.t. 12 different conspiracy topics. The dataset thus contains almost 42,000 labels, each of which determined by majority among three expert annotators. The dataset was selected from COVID-19 related Twitter data spanning from January 2020 to June 2021 using a list of 54 keywords. The dataset can be used to train machine learning based classifiers for both stance and topic detection, either individually or simultaneously. BERT was used successfully for the combined task. The dataset can also be used to further study the prevalence of different conspiracy narratives. To this end we qualitatively analyze the tweets, discussing the structure of conspiracy narratives that are frequently found in the dataset. Furthermore, we illustrate the interconnection between the conspiracy categories as well as the keywords.