Dr. Tim Ruhe, Technische Universität Dortmund 

Abstract 

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic as well as previous crises, like the global financial- and the European refugee crisis, has unearthed the fact that some people are able to cope with these kinds of situations in a more productive way than others. We attribute this to different coping strategies, which people apply to situations of inherent uncertainty. As a wide range of possible coping strategies -- ranging from gathering information to believing in conspiracy theories -- exists, the remaining question is, which of the possible coping strategies are actually expressed and applied. To this end we investigated a total of 1.6 million public German tweets, with respect to possibly expressed coping strategies. More than 3000 tweets were annotated, using predefined categories, which themselves correspond to certain coping strategies. These 3000 tweets were then used to analyze possible correlations with direct mandates in the 299 German constituencies. This talk summarizes the overall analysis approach, as well as the results of exploratory analysis of the entire 1.6 million tweets. Furthermore, preliminary results on possible correlations with the direct mandates are presented. 

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