Tweet Stimuli Set for Content about Black People (TSS-CBP): Development and testing of stimuli to assess the impacts of online race-related content

Black young adults use social media frequently and they are especially active on Twitter. Black young adults are exposed to both racially-affirming positive content and also racially-discriminatory negative content on Twitter. Correlational investigations have suggested that exposure to such content has psychological consequences, yet our understanding of acute responses to race-related Twitter messages remains hampered by the lack of a social media stimuli set that can be employed in an experimental setting. Therefore, we developed and tested an initial stimuli set of Tweets with different valences (i.e., positive, negative) and content (i.e., race-related, non-race-related) that can be used for testing experimental hypotheses about physiological, emotional, and behavioral changes associated with exposure to Twitter content in subsequent research. In two studies with Black college-attending young adult Twitter users (N = 43; M age = 19.26) and a national sample of Black young adult Twitter users (N = 290, M age = 25.85), we developed and tested the internal consistency, construct, convergent, ecological, and criterion-related validity of the stimuli set. The final Tweet Stimuli Set for Content about Black People (TSS-CBP) includes 16 stimuli grouped into four conditions (positive non-race-related, positive race-related, negative non-race-related, and negative race-related).