Köksal, Selin and Pesando, Luca Maria and Rotondi, Valentina and Sanliturk, Ebru (2022) Harnessing the Potential of Google Searches for Understanding Dynamics of Intimate Partner Violence Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak. European journal of population= Revue europeenne de demographie. pp. 1-29.
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Abstract
Most social phenomena are inherently complex and hard to measure, often due to under-reporting, stigma, social desirability bias, and rapidly changing external circumstances. This is for instance the case of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), a highly-prevalent social phenomenon which has drastically risen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores whether big data—an increasingly common tool to track, nowcast, and forecast social phenomena in close-to-real time—might help track and understand IPV dynamics. We leverage online data from Google Trends to explore whether online searches might help reach “hard-to-reach” populations such as victims of IPV using Italy as a case-study. We ask the following questions: Can digital traces help predict instances of IPV—both potential threat and actual violent cases—in Italy? Is their predictive power weaker or stronger in the aftermath of crises such as COVID-19? Our results suggest that online searches using selected keywords measuring different facets of IPV are a powerful tool to track potential threats of IPV before and during global-level crises such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, with stronger predictive power post outbreaks. Conversely, online searches help predict actual violence only in post-outbreak scenarios. Our findings, validated by a Facebook survey, also highlight the important role that socioeconomic status (SES) plays in shaping online search behavior, thus shedding new light on the role played by third-level digital divides in determining the predictive power of digital traces. More specifically, they suggest that forecasting might be more reliable among high-SES population strata.
| Item Type: | Scientific journal article, Newspaper article or Magazine article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | Social studies Social studies > Economics Social studies > Sociology |
| Department/unit: | Dipartimento economia aziendale, sanità e sociale > Centro competenze pratiche e politiche sanitarie |
| Depositing User: | Valentina Rotondi |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jul 2022 06:46 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Jul 2022 06:56 |
| URI: | http://repository.supsi.ch/id/eprint/13470 |
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