Young Researcher of the Year Award 2009 - Annelies Verhaeghe

Annelies Verhaeghe

Annelies Verhaeghe

Age: 28
Company: InSites Consulting
Country: Belgium

Topic chosen

Ageing

Title of submission

And they lived happily ever after...
Analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly's quality-of-life

Abstract

Ageing has the most significant impact on people's physical and mental health. As a society, we try to keep the quality of life of elderly people as high as possible by putting a lot of time and effort in biological studies that seek to improve health. As researchers we often forget what living with a certain mental or physical condition really means.

In order to change the world for an ageing population, I have studied how several health conditions affect the daily life of elderly people. Instead of directly interviewing research participants about ageing, I observed what the elderly and caregivers spontaneously say on social media platforms where there are plenty of conversations present about health and ageing. The following topics will be highlighted in the presentation:

  • The major themes about the impact of ageing on daily life that can be found back in more than 80.000 online conversations
  • What the elderly and their caregivers recommend to each other to increase quality of life
  • How social media netnography and text analytics brings you answers to questions you did not ask
  • How quality of life can be implicitly measured through sentiment analysis

About Annelies

Annelies Verhaeghe is Senior Consultant at the ForwaR&D lab department at InSites Consulting. At the ForwaR&D Lab's she is in charge of the development of new methods and tools which enable us to fill blind spots in consumer understanding. Currently, She is engaging in online observational research and text analytics but in the past she has been involved in connected research, online panel research and innovation research.