Facebook as a Source for Human-Centered Engineering: Web Mining-Based Reconstruction of Stakeholder Perspectives on Energy Systems

In this paper, a new approach in acceptance research is presented analyzing Facebook-user profiles and text data of stakeholders for purposes of human-centered engineering. Thereby, data from topic-specific German Facebookpages are collected by means of a self-developed Facebook-parser and analyzed semi-automatically with Web Mining-methods applying a multi-level annotation scheme for sentiment analysis. The aim of the analysis is to get insights about (1) who is discussing energy systems in the Web, (2) how users evaluate energy systems (positive, negative, neutral), and (3) which gender-related differences in user discussions (acceptance factors) can be observed. As an application example, the renewable energy form deep geothermal energy is used, which has increasingly become subject of public discussion in the context of the German energy turnaround. The results of the Facebookstudy show that in human-centered engineering of energy systems gender-sensitivity is of major importance: Men are primarily focusing on the overall economic efficiency and the environment protection, women pay more attention to costs and benefits that affect themselves. Thus, engineers of complex energy systems such as geothermal energy should therefore take into consideration the aspect of divergent gender perspectives.