Tweet Analysis: Most Common New Year's Resolutions

New Years' Resolutions are an interesting universal phenomena. Some sources suggest that they have been around for 4,000 years! Speaking of resolutions, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt once mused, “How many of our New Year's resolutions have been about fixing a flaw?”

Is Mr. Haidt right? Do people really focus on fixing flaws, like losing weight, quitting bad habits, and curbing spending? Or, do they focus more on honing their strengths?

There is only one way to find out! Let us look at some sentiment data, shall we?

In this post we are going to use Gigasheet's free online CSV viewer feature to explore some data about New Year's Resolutions. It's simple to use and makes data exploration available to everyone. If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Gigasheet to find data insights!

Twitter New Year's Resolution Data

Here we have a sample dataset. It is a collection of over 5000 tweets about New Years' Resolutions from December 2015. (The good old days before COVID and before Twitter went bananas.) This database also contains demographic and geographical data of users and resolution categorizations. Let us use Gigasheet to explore this dataset and understand if these New Years’ Resolutions are about flaw-fixing, self-improvement, achieving goals, or something else.

Data dictionary:

This dataset contains the following data fields. The ones in boldface are the ones we will be looking at for this article.

1. resolution_category

2. gender

3. name

4. text

5. resolution_topics

6. retweet_count

7. tweet_coord

8. tweet_created

9. tweet_date

10. tweet_id

11. tweet_location

12. tweet_state

13. user_timezone

14. tweet_region

Upload New Year's Resolution data to Gigasheet

Using Gigasheet, you can open this file (and other large files) in just a few seconds. All you need is an account.

(Don’t have a Gigasheet account yet? Get your FREE account here. Or, you can view the dataset without logging in.)

This is how the file looks when uploaded to Gigasheet:

All 5,011 rows, ready to be analyzed!

Now, we are ready to sink our teeth in this vast dataset and get some insight.

What is the Most Popular Resolution?

If most resolutions are indeed about fixing flaws, they must be the most popular ones among the Twitterati, right? So, let us dissect the most retweeted tweets.

To achieve this, we can simply sort the column retweet_count from the highest value to the lowest. Click on the three lines at the right of the column name and select 'Sort Sheet 9 to 1.'

And that's it.