After thoroughly investigating the language used by British newspapers and Twitter users to describe the European Refugee Crisis, we have come to several conclusions.

 

Our Twitter and UK media sentiment analyses, as well as our EU asylum application analysis, confirm our first hypothesis that high levels of incoming refugees to the UK correlate with high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK news outlets. The analyses further confirm our second hypothesis, that terrorist attacks in Europe will correlate with high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK media reports. 

 

Our findings can potentially have a significant impact on the wider academic and popular debate surrounding the European Refugee Crisis. The findings can inform government officials, NGO’s, individuals and other stakeholders of the general public and media attitude towards the European Refugee Crisis and refugees coming to the UK. Such information can be of use when developing and implementing new integration policies, for instance. 

 

Yet, it is important to keep in mind that there are several limitations to our investigation. We have used Twitter data as a parameter to gain insight into the general public’s perception of the European Refugee Crisis. However, Twitter users are not representative of the UK or global population as a whole. Hence, in our project, we make certain assumptions, which may not necessarily be true. Other limitations of our project are that we only used a sample of Tweets and a sample of UK media reports for our analysis. These samples may be biased and unrepresentative of all Tweets and all media reports linked to the European Refugee Crisis. 

 

In the future, it would be interesting to further investigate the correlations observed in our investigation. Why is there a correlation between high levels of incoming refugees to the UK and high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK news outlets? Why do terrorist attacks in Europe correlate with high levels of negative sentiments on Twitter and UK media reports?