Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach (Extract)

Occasionally, studies find contradictory results. For example, multiple studies report that emoticons (i.e. :) :-() are used more often by females[34],[36],[38], but Huffaker & Calvert found males use them more in a sample of 100 teenage bloggers[39]. This particular discrepancy could be sample-related–differing demographics or having a non-representative sample (Huffaker & Calvert looked at 100 bloggers, while later studies have looked at thousands of twitter users) or it could be due to differences in the domain of the text (blogs versus twitter).