Analysing community reaction to refugees through text analysis of social media data

Understanding the social integration of refugees requires scholars and community leaders to understand the complex and varied political reaction of citizens to the prospect and reality of refugees entering their local communities. In this study, we apply the Structural Topic Model (STM) to characterise citizen-level discourse in comments posted in response to refugee-related news articles on Facebook in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Roanoke, Virginia, two cities with similar demographics and conservative partisanship, but sharply contrasting refugee-related policies and experiences. We find that, overall, commenters framed their arguments with an identity-based frame more often than economics, morality, security or legality frames, but that these tended to be blended in ways that obscure the basis in identity. We also find that comments within the discourse of the more refugee-experienced Lancaster community were more likely to involve substantive arguments than in Roanoke, more likely to use economics frames, less likely to use identity frames, less likely to involve incivility and less likely to feature a salient misinformation-influenced theme (refugees vs. homeless veterans). This suggests that host community discourse grows more substantive and positive as a function of hospitable refugee policies and refugee hosting experience, and we discuss how this research might be expanded beyond this pair of cases to evaluate this broader implication.