The starting point of Mindi D. Foster’s research, which was published in the British Journal of Sociology in 2015, is the analysis of the consequences of sexist experiences upon women’ mental and physical health. For Foster, the identification of concrete actions that could reduce those risks should therefore be of major concern. The theoretical frame from which the author builds her study is Drury and Reicher’s Elaborated Social Identity Model or ESIM (1999). This theory states that collective actions aimed at reducing unfair situations have a positive influence on psychological and physical well-being. Effects have indeed been revealed by studies, though they don’t clearly point at positive or negative results.
Active, public and collective actions are said to be positive for people’s wellbeing. For this reason, the use of social media such as Twitter can represent an appropriate field of study. Studying this social network can also be justified by the profile of its user: 74% being woman aged under 25. What’s more, the social impact of collective mobilisation generated by this network can be observed in recent geopolitical events. Finally, the use of Twitter is in close relationship with the definition of collective action to reinforce the pertaining group status. A form of collective mobilisation called “consensus mobilisation” (Klandermans, 1984) or «persuasive action» (Brunsting et Postmes, 2002; Postmes et Brunsting, 2002) can also generate a desire for acceptance of one’s point of view, as well as to influence knowledges, believes and public attitudes to change a situation perceived as unacceptable. The use of Twitter belongs, in this sense, to a certain form of consensus mobilisation. Moreover, if the use of Twitter serves the purpose of collective actions in relation with the ESIM (Drury et al, 2005) , it can also increase general well-being.
The hypothesis, therefore, is that women using Twitter should see an increase in their well-being (for example through a better resistance to discrimination and its consequences) in comparison with the control group which doesn’t use Twitter. The participants are taken out of a student population (N = 93. M age = 20,56, ET = 5,05) which have answered an advert in the University of Ontario, Canada.
The study took place during three days, during which participant were exposed to openly sexist documents. The first day, participants were confronted with sexism in the media, the second day, with sexism in politics and, the third day, to sexism in the university.
Every day, participants from the tested group had to share the received information on social media. The control group was divided in three sub-groups: one group had to share information that wasn’t related to the topic; the second group had to share the received information but couldn’t comment on it; the third group was prohibited from using Twitter until the end of the experiment. At the end of each day, participants had to fill out a questionnaire in order to evaluate the impact of their actions on their well-being.
Measures were then done using two different scales: neuroticism and social support, two factors that are measures of well-being. A semantic analysis of the Tweets was also done.
Results show that an important majority of the tweets point to the presence of collective intention (90,4%) and are part of a mobilisation of consensus (87,7%). In parallel to the measures of neuroticism and social support, the results also show that women exercised a collective action through their tweets which increased their well-being. In opposition, the control groups that couldn’t tweet or not about the topic of sexism didn’t see an evolution of their well-being.
With regards to the limitation, we can notice the lack of measure regarding the effect of time and of collective emotion. What’s more, the institutional effects of sexism have not been considered. The results of this study suggest nonetheless that tweeter can be a useful and accessible tool to reduce the negative health consequences of sexist discrimination. Of course, tweets cannot, by themselves, improve things. However, they provide a place for women to express themselves, increase their self-confidence and help fight the many culpabilities, obstacles and injustices in this domain.
Carlo, 44 Years old. I was a primary school teacher working in a pédopsychiatric hospital and I’m actually in my second year of social psychology.