Abstract

This research explores attitudes towards the testing of cosmetics on animals, as pressure is increasing all over the world to stop animal testing and different countries have introduced policies to ban it. It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year. But because only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning use of animals for testing and research, the precise numbers are unknown. This research was designed to investigate whether awareness of the issue impacts whether or not people support animal testing. The research hypothesis is that the reason people support animal testing is that there is a lack of awareness of the issue. To understand people’s awareness to this topic, data was collected from social media, where people feel comfortable in sharing their opinions freely and anonymously, and also from IBM Watson discovery. This study adopts a quantitative research method to evaluate the sentiments of people and their reactions to key hash tags on Twitter. The study used sentiment analysis because it allowed the researcher to gain an overview of the wider public opinions on this topic. Sentiment analysis is designed to work with Twitter data, taking into account the structure, length and specific language, using a post man twitter API approach to see users’ interface and computationally measure people’s perceptions, understanding, awareness, reactions, and observations. An unsupervised data set was created using natural language processing, python and IBM Watson Discovery. Results showed that sentiment analysis domain and as well as the technologies involved in its implementation are an excellent way to study public sentiments, and social media is used to gather, clean, and classify results. In this project there was a good mix of positive and negative reactions to the different aspects of Animal testing on Twitter.

Publication Date

Spring 2020

Document Type

Master's Project

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Professional Studies (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Graduate Programs & Research

Advisor

Ioannis Karamitsos

Campus

RIT Dubai

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