Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8216-9064

Date of Award

8-8-2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Counseling and Psychological Services

First Advisor

Erin Mason, PHD

Second Advisor

Catherine Chang, PHD

Third Advisor

Yingying Wang, PHD

Fourth Advisor

Renae Mayes, PHD

Abstract

Advocacy work for marginalized student populations can help eliminate systemic barriers in schools. School counselors interact with millions of P-12 students daily and have the unique skills to advocate for marginalized students (U.S. Department of Education, 2019; Edirmanasinghe et al., 2022). Social media platforms such as Twitter allow school counselors to advocate outside of the school setting. It also allows them to obtain professional development and connect to other professionals (Schultz, 2022). In this study, the researcher seeks to learn how school counseling professionals' use of Twitter changed over ten years when using the #scchat hashtag and how their advocacy for marginalized student populations on Twitter has changed over time. Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) data was collected via NodeXL over a ten-year period, allowing the researcher to identify sample years of network data to answer the research questions. The researcher used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify relationships and influencers within the networks and quantitative content analysis to analyze the frequency of hashtags, specific words, and sentiment. The results show significant growth in using #scchat regarding the number of tweets and users. The density of the graphs decreased as the networks became more extensive, and the number of group clusters increased. The results also show increased advocacy over the ten years using words such as advocacy, advocate, equity, race, ethnicity, racism, transgender, LGBTQIA+, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native American.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/35890221

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