A group of female researchers have proposed ‘Wellbeing-Former’, a model that scores levels of distress, disruption to daily life and mistrust of institutions as expressed on social media, whilst providing a rationale for each score.
Exposed to the humid westerly winds and depressions of the North Atlantic, Ireland suffers from frequent rainfall and river flooding, which is aggravated by climate change. Their consequences go beyond the usual material damage and economic indicators: this is what an evaluation framework presented by two researchers, based on what the population spontaneously expresses online rather than on surveys, aims to measure.
The instrument retains three dimensions: distress, disruption of daily life and distance from institutions. To apply it on a large scale, the authors developed a dedicated reasoning model, Wellbeing-Former, which identifies the well-being indices related to flooding in a message, assigns a score based on these elements and explains its evaluation.
The corpus, compiled via the Meta Content Library, brings together around 224,000 Irish publications from 2012 to 2016 containing the words "flood", "rain" or "storm". The analysis provides a reading over time of the impacts experienced and feared, presented as a complement to surveys for adaptation planning and public communication.
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