Houston College Sport Programs’ Hurricane Harvey Communication

Abstract

This study provides a Twitter content analysis of tweets by Houston-based Division I college sport programs during Hurricane Harvey. A content analysis was performed on the tweets appearing on the main intercollegiate athletics Twitter pages of University of Houston, Houston Baptist University, Prairie View A&M University, Rice University, and Texas Southern University in response to Hurricane Harvey. The researchers based their study on grounded theory informed by a study conducted by Inoue and Havard (2015). While this study examined tweets rather than newspaper and magazine articles like Inoue and Havard (2015), this study confirmed the theme findings in Inoue and Havard (2015) applied well in a Twitter social media setting as well. New themes that were added by the researchers in the current study proved to be applicable.

You Know the Words

“…Non-lyric based sport content analysis studies are quite common-particularly in a social media context. There have been Facebook content analysis studies (Achen, Kaczorowksi, Horsmann, & Ketzler, 2018;Wallace, Wilson, & Miloch, 2011;Waters, Burkes, Jackson, & Buning, 2011), Instagram content analysis studies (Hull & Kim, 2016;Smith & Sanderson, 2015), a Pinterest study of North American professional sport leagues (Hambrick & Kang, 2015), and Twitter content analysis studies (Doran, Cooper, & Mihalik, 2015;Hanna, et. al, 2020;Sanderson and Gramlich, 2016;Zimmerman, Johnson, & Ridley).…”