The international situation of refugees and their image on Twitter. A challenge for social work interventions.

Abstract

Since its beginning, the refugee crisis has produced a lot of public opinion through social networks and has been a challenge for coexistence and social intervention. The aim of this article is to identify the discourses that are being disseminated though Twitter about the refugees, and that are related to the intervention in Social Work. Data were extracted from Twitter from mid-December 2015 until mid-December 2016. Near two millions of tweets were extracted with the keyword “refugees” in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), through of the NodeXL extraction tool. For this article only the data in Spanish were used. After the data mining procedure, we applied different strategies for filtering, transforming, and coding data in order to identify the issues related to the different levels of social intervention. Results show how the three classic levels of intervention in Social Work (individual-family, group and community) are present in the discourses about refugees on Twitter, making possible to design strategies for the intervention.