Using social media activity to identify personality characteristics of Navy personnel

Abstract

This research explores the use of Twitter to determine if the personality characteristics of well-performing Navy personnel can be identified based on their Twitter use. Well-performing Navy personnel are identified by using the publicly-available Navy promotion lists and then those names were used to query Twitter in order to identify possible accounts belonging to these Sailors. Data from those Twitter accounts that could be positively identified as belonging to Navy personnel were then fed into textual analysis software and each user’s level of the personality traits in the Five Factor Model of personality was calculated based on the results previous research. These results and other data were also stored in a graph database in order to make the data easier to query. Although this research shows that it is possible to successfully calculate a user’s personality based on textual analysis of their Twitter activity, the primary conclusions of this research is that this method is insufficient to identify specific traits that make Navy personnel stand out on Twitter.