Houston College Sport Programs’ Hurricane Harvey Communication: A Twitter Content Analysis

Abstract

This study provides a Twitter content analysis of tweets by Houston-based Division I college sport programs during Hurricane Harvey. A content analysis was performed on the tweets appearing on the main intercollegiate athletics Twitter pages of University of Houston, Houston Baptist University, Prairie View A&M University, Rice University, and Texas Southern University in response to Hurricane Harvey. The researchers based their study on grounded theory informed by a study conducted by Inoue and Havard (2015). While this study examined tweets rather than newspaper and magazine articles like Inoue and Havard (2015), this study confirmed the theme findings in Inoue and Havard (2015) applied well in a Twitter social media setting as well. New themes that were added by the researchers in the current study proved to be applicable.