Personality and situation.

Social media posts are used to examine what people experience in their everyday
lives. A new method is developed for assessing the situational characteristics of social
media posts based on the words used in these posts. To accomplish this, machine learning
models are built that accurately approximate the judgments of human raters. This new
method of situational assessment is applied on two of the most popular social media sites:
Twitter and Facebook. Millions of Tweets and Facebook statuses are analyzed. Temporal
patterns of situational experiences are found. Geographic and gender differences in
experience are examined. Relationships between personality and situation experience
were also assessed. Implications of these finding and future applications of this new
method of situational assessment are discussed.

Situations are important in relation to behavior and personality (Lewin, 1946, 1951; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Zimbardo, 2007). However, historical studies of situations have suffered from disagreement about their structure. The Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ: Wagerman & Funder, 2009) was developed as a tool to comprehensively measure situation characteristics. Because the RSQ is still relatively new, the factor structure of the RSQ has yet to be examined. Identifying the factor structure of the RSQ is important in order to provide an interpretation of the dimensions of situations and to make the first step in creating a smaller measure of situation characteristics that takes less time for participants to complete. Using a variety of factor extraction methods, 9 factors appeared consistently: Adversity, Social Negativity, Obligation, Cognitive/Intellectual, Mate Attraction, Sensuous, Positivity, and Competition. This study provides in-depth insight into the characteristics of situations based on a quantitative measure from an adult sample.