Emilio Zagheni’s research while affiliated with Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and other places

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Publications (38)


Is Facebook’s Advertising Data Accurate Enough for Use in Social Science Research? Insights from a Cross-National Online Survey
  • Article
  • Full-text available

November 2022

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419 Reads

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16 Citations

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society)

André Grow

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Daniela Perrotta

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Emanuele Del Fava

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[...]

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Social scientists increasingly use Facebook's advertising platform for research, either in the form of conducting digital censuses of the general population, or for recruiting participants for survey research. Both approaches depend on the accuracy of the data that Facebook provides about its users, but little is known about how accurate these data are. We address this gap in a large-scale, cross-national online survey (N = 137,224), in which we compare self-reported and Facebook-classified demographic information (sex, age and region of residence). Our results suggest that Facebook's advertising platform can be fruitfully used for conducting social science research if additional steps are taken to assess the accuracy of the characteristics under consideration.

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Digital and Computational Demography

April 2022

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185 Reads

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10 Citations

Digital and computational demography explores demography in relation to the digital revolution – the rapid technological improvements in digitized information storage, computational power and the spread of the internet and mobile technologies since the turn of the new millennium. We cover three ways in which the digital revolution touches upon demography. First, we discuss how digital technologies, through their impacts on daily lives and in shifting how individuals access information, communicate and access services, have implications for demographic outcomes linked to health and mortality, fertility and family, and migration. Second, we discuss how the digital revolution has created a wide range of new data sources such as digital trace and geospatial data that can be repurposed for demographic research, and enabled respondent recruitment across the world via the internet and social media. Third, we discuss how improvements in computational power have facilitated the use of computational methods such as microsimulation and agent-based modelling as well as machine learning techniques for demographic applications. We conclude by discussing future opportunities and challenges for digital demography.


Multi-Platform Social Media Use: Little Evidence of Impacts on Adult Well-Being

June 2020

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17 Reads

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2 Citations

Social media have become a near-ubiquitous part of our lives. The growing concern that their use may alter our well-being has been met with elusive scientific evidence. Existing literature often simplifies social media use as a homogeneous process. In reality, social media use and functions vary widely depending on platform and demographic characteristics of users, and there may be qualitative differences between using few versus many different social media platforms. Using data from the General Social Survey, an underanalyzed data source for this purpose, we characterize intensive social media users and examine how differential platform use impacts well-being. We document substantial heterogeneity in the demography of users and show that intensive users tend to be young, female, more likely to be Black than Hispanic, from high SES backgrounds, from more religious backgrounds, and from families with migration background, compared to both non-users and moderate users. The intensity of social media use seemed largely unrelated to well-being in both unadjusted models and in propensity-score models that adjusted for selection bias and demographic factors. Among middle-aged and older adults, however, intensive social media use may be slightly associated with depressive symptoms. Our findings indicate that although mediums of communication have changed with the advent of social media, these new mediums are not necessarily detrimental to well-being.


The impact of Hurricane Maria on out-migration from Puerto Rico: Evidence from Facebook data

January 2019

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110 Reads

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8 Citations

Natural disasters such as hurricanes can cause substantial population out-migration. However, the magnitude of population movements is difficult to estimate using only traditional sources of migration data. We utilize data obtained from Facebook's advertising platform to estimate out-migration from Puerto Rico in the months after Hurricane Maria. We find evidence to indicate a 17.0% increase in the number of Puerto Rican migrants present in the US over the period October 2017 to January 2018. States with the biggest increases were Florida, New York and Pennsylvania, and there were disproportionately larger increases in the 15-30 age groups and for men compared to women. Additionally, we find evidence of subsequent return migration to Puerto Rico over the period January 2018 to March 2018. These results illustrate the power of complementing social media and traditional data to monitor demographic indicators over time, particularly after a shock, such as a natural disaster, to understand large changes in population characteristics.


Transfers of informal care time in the United States: the role of demographic differentials in intergenerational flows by age, sex, and racial and national background

January 2019

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10 Reads

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1 Citation

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research

Recent work based on the American Time Use Survey (2011-2013) provided estimates of matrices of "who provides care to whom" by age and sex within care activities in the U.S. In this paper, we build on that line of research by evaluating the strength of race, ethnicity, and national origin as proxy indicators of cultural propensities to engage in informal care. Our results point to several key differences and similarities between groups based on their characteristics. For example, we find that compared to other groups, native-born African American men exhibit the lowest child care participation and transfer rates, whereas foreign-born Hispanics of any race have significantly higher rates of daily participation in child care. Moreover, we find that the propensity to provide adult care is largely dependent on socio-economic characteristics and household structure. However, our models indicate that neither race/ethnicity nor nativity are strong predictors of the observed differences when household composition and socio-economic factors are taken into account. Thus, we believe that more complex cultural factors are at play. As an illustrative example of the consequences of demographic change, we introduce the care support ratio (CSR), which is a measure of macro-level dependency for non-market transfers. The application of the CSR indicates that future informal care time deficits may result from the growing care needs of the ageing population.


Figure 1. Facebook classification of users who are expatriates (total: 62).
Figure 2. UNDESA population and Facebook Network (FN) users in Morocco and Italy by age and gender. Light shading=UNDESA population, mid shading=UNDESA & raw FN users, and dark shading = raw FN users
Migration Data using Social Media: a European Perspective, Publications Office of the European Union

July 2018

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721 Reads

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65 Citations

Migration is a top political priority for the European Union (EU). Data on international migrant stocks and flows are essential for effective migration management. In this report, we estimated the number of expatriates in 17 EU countries based on the number of Facebook Network users who are classified by Facebook as “expats”. To this end, we proposed a method for correcting the over- or under-representativeness of Facebook Network users compared to countries’ actual population. This method uses Facebook penetration rates by age group and gender in the country of previous residence and country of destination of a Facebook expat. The purpose of Facebook Network expat estimations is not to reproduce migration statistics, but rather to generate separate estimates of expatriates, since migration statistics and Facebook Network expats estimates do not measure the same quantities of interest. Estimates of social media application users who are classified as expats can be a timely, low-cost, and almost globally available source of information for estimating stocks of international migrants. Our methodology allowed for the timely capture of the increase of Venezuelan migrants in Spain. However, there are important methodological and data integrity issues with using social media data sources for studying migration-related phenomena. For example, our methodology led us to significantly overestimate the number of expats from Philippines in Spain and in Italy and there is no evidence that this overestimation may be valid. While research on the use of big data sources for migration is in its infancy, and the diffusion of internet technologies in less developed countries is still limited, the use of big data sources can unveil useful insights on quantitative and qualitative characteristics of migration.


Bowling Together: Scientific Collaboration Networks of Demographers at European Population Conferences

June 2018

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32 Reads

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32 Citations

European Journal of Population

Studies of collaborative networks of demographers are relatively scarce. Similar studies in other social sciences provide insight into scholarly trends of both the fields and characteristics of their successful scientists. Exploiting a unique database of metadata for papers presented at six European Population Conferences, this report explores factors explaining research collaboration among demographers. We find that (1) collaboration among demographers has increased over the past 10 years, however, among co-authored papers, collaboration across institutions remains relatively unchanged over the period, (2) papers based on core demographic subfields such as fertility, mortality, migration and data and methods are more likely to involve multiple authors and (3) multiple author teams that are all female are less likely to co-author with colleagues in different institutions. Potential explanations for these results are discussed alongside comparisons with similar studies of collaboration networks in other related social sciences.


Professional Gender Gaps Across US Cities

January 2018

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99 Reads

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16 Citations

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Gender imbalances in work environments have been a long-standing concern. Identifying the existence of such imbalances is key to designing policies to help overcome them. In this work, we study gender trends in employment across various dimensions in the United States. This is done by analyzing anonymous, aggregate statistics that were extracted from LinkedIn's advertising platform. The data contain the number of male and female LinkedIn users with respect to (i) location, (ii) age, (iii) industry and (iv) certain skills. We studied which of these categories correlate the most with high relative male or female presence on LinkedIn. In addition to examining the summary statistics of the LinkedIn data, we model the gender balance as a function of the different employee features using linear regression. Our results suggest that the gender gap varies across all feature types, but the differences are most profound among industries and skills. A high correlation between gender ratios of people in our LinkedIn data set and data provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics serves as external validation for our results.


Leveraging Facebook's Advertising Platform to Monitor Stocks of Migrants

October 2017

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651 Reads

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217 Citations

Population and Development Review

Given the importance of demographic data for monitoring development, the lack of appropriate sources and indicators for measuring progress toward the achievement of targets—like the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”—is a significant cause of uncertainty. As part of a larger effort to tackle the issue, in 2014 the United Nations asked an independent expert advisory group to make recommendations to bring about a data revolution in sustainable development.1 Data innovation, like new digital traces from a variety of technologies, is seen as a significant opportunity to inform policy evaluation and to improve estimates and projections. In this article, we contribute to the development of tools and methods that leverage new data sources for demographic research. We present an innovative approach to estimate stocks of migrants using a previously untapped data source: Facebook’s advertising platform. This freely available source allows advertisers and researchers to query information about socio-demographic characteristics of Facebook users, aggregated at various levels of geographic granularity. We have three main goals: i) to present a new data source that is relevant for demographers; ii) to discuss how demographers can avoid some of the problems related to the analysis of on representative Web and social media data; and iii) to lay the foundations on which demographers and data scientists can build in the future.



Citations (33)


... Gathering data in CSS could mean web scraping, sending requests to large-scale databases using Structured Query Language (SQL), building Application Programming Interface (API) solutions or connecting to them through programming languages, or building an Agent-Based Model (ABM) [8,9] or using other types of simulation methods to create artificial data. Online surveys [10,11] are designed and run e.g., by recruiting respondents through social media advertisement [12]. Online experiments [13,14] could be another way of gathering data. ...

Reference:

Thinking spatially in computational social science: Commentary on Yong-Yeol Ahn (2021): “Representation learning for computational imagination”
Is Facebook’s Advertising Data Accurate Enough for Use in Social Science Research? Insights from a Cross-National Online Survey

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society)

... Digitalized scholarly databases with bibliometric information are a new source for studying scientists as a population, although they first need to be repurposed to focus on individual scientists rather than individual publications. This allows for the exploration of questions about science and scientists at an unprecedented level of detail (Kashyap et al., 2022;Liu et al., 2023;Wang & Barabási, 2021). Individuals can be studied according to age, seniority, gender, discipline, and institutional type-and most importantly for the present study, scientists can be tracked over time. ...

Digital and Computational Demography
  • Citing Preprint
  • April 2022

... Importantly, these studies typically cannot detect the direction of the association: Do we feel slightly worse than usual because we use social media or do we turn to social media because we feel worse than usual? Recent research seems to suggest the latter pathway, as studies that correct for self-selection biases (Lohmann & Zagheni, 2021) or that evaluate bidirectional pathways over time (Boer et al., 2020;Coyne et al., 2020;Puukko et al., 2020) show that normal amounts of social media use does not predict well-being when accounting for reverse causation. For example, Puukko and colleagues (2020) followed almost 3000 adolescents over six years and found that social media use was prospectively unrelated to depressive symptoms, but that depressive symptoms prospectively predicted higher social media use. ...

Multi-Platform Social Media Use: Little Evidence of Impacts on Adult Well-Being
  • Citing Preprint
  • June 2020

... On the contrary, re-marriages, non-marital unions and cohabitations are becoming increasingly common, especially in more egalitarian settings (Pessin, 2018), such that partners may still be available to provide care, both own childcare and old-age partner care (Noël-Miller, 2011). Moreover, ethnic and racial informal care differentials in the USA further demonstrated diverging trends in care prevalence, timing, and intensity, driven by cultural affinities, living arrangements, and norms, in terms of providing and receiving care (Cook & Cohen, 2018;Dukhovnov & Zagheni, 2019). Proximal cultural and familial composition factors play an integral role in both the availability of care as well as wellbeing of caregivers, as some ethnic groups that rely on filial piety, communal values and support have greater care support (Mendez-Luck et al., 2016;Powers & Whitlatch, 2016). ...

Transfers of informal care time in the United States: the role of demographic differentials in intergenerational flows by age, sex, and racial and national background
  • Citing Article
  • January 2019

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research

... Working around the limitation of Facebook's data sharing policy -much more restrictive than Twitter's- Zagheni et al. (2017) proposed an approach that leveraged Facebook's advertisement platform (which is freely available) to estimate the stock of international migrants in the US. In a more recent study, Alexander et al. (2019) investigated the impact of Hurricane Maria on emigration from Puerto Rico also using Facebook advertising platform (Ads Manager). Due to Twitter's open data sharing policy, this is the social media source of data that has garnered more attention from researchers, including migration and mobility scholars. ...

The impact of Hurricane Maria on out-migration from Puerto Rico: Evidence from Facebook data
  • Citing Preprint
  • January 2019

... Another notable area is the use of predictive analytics to forecast migratory flows. By processing and analyzing vast datasets at unprecedented speeds, AI enables authorities to detect patterns, assess risks, and anticipate migration trends, exceeding human analytical capabilities (Spyratos et al., 2018). Real-time data transmission and integration with AI algorithms could further amplify these systems, allowing for threat detection and evidence-based decision-making. ...

Migration Data using Social Media: a European Perspective, Publications Office of the European Union

... Big data offer clear advantages: because of the sheer scale of data and their availability it is expected that they will drive new directions of research (Billari & Zagheni, 2017). We have already seen evidence of this, as new data allowed analyzing some of the relatively unexplored research avenues including how long and short term mobilities are related, where different temporal and spatial scales would be taken into account, relationship between internal and international migration, temporary and circular migration, people moving multiple times. ...

Big Data and Population Processes: A Revolution?
  • Citing Preprint
  • July 2017

... All studies have pointed out gender inequality in academic mobility and cooperation (Schaer et al., 2017;Tam & Araújo, 2017;Tzanakou, 2017;Uhly et al., 2017;Vohlídalová, 2017;Toader & Dahinden, 2018;Abel et al., 2019;Aksnes et al., 2019;Cohen et al., 2020;Gibb, 2020;Jenkins, 2020;Malakhov, 2020;Nikunem & Lempiäinen, 2020;Yan et al., 2020;Zhang et al., 2020;Henderson, 2021;Moratti, 2021;Robles-Belmont, 2021;Tasci, 2021;Bao, 2022;Nachatar Singh, 2022;Schittenhelm, 2022;Wendt, 2022;Zhao et al., 2022). ...

Bowling Together: Scientific Collaboration Networks of Demographers at European Population Conferences
  • Citing Article
  • June 2018

European Journal of Population

... For example, researchers found that gender gaps in Facebook advertising data were correlated with digital skills such as sending emails with attached files or using copy-and-paste tools [26]. Research used LinkedIn advertising data to examine gender gaps in industries and skills across the USA and found that education and medical/health were femaledominated on LinkedIn [27], while industries and skills related to the technology domain were male-dominated in terms of user count [27]. Similarly, research found that globally, there were more men than women in IT on LinkedIn [28]. ...

Professional Gender Gaps Across US Cities

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

... Disaster mortality has been shown to be unevenly distributed across population subgroups [55]. Understanding spatial, demographic characteristics and cause of death distribution can be a useful tool in DRR to identify vulnerable population groups and improve disaster mitigation [12,91]. ...

Differential mortality patterns from hydro-meteorological disasters: Evidence from cause-of-death data by age and sex
  • Citing Article
  • January 2015

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research