Each person faces many transitions throughout their life as they develop, age, and
change. Yet people often find it difficult to manage where and how to present and discuss
identity transitions and changing identities on social media sites, and to find
communities of similar others. These difficulties are often amplified for those with
marginalized or stigmatized identities (e.g., transgender and other LGBQ people,
first generation and low-income college students). We examine how people fragment
their identities and networks among separate social media sites during major life
transitions, and the social inequities that exist for people with marginalized identities,
particularly those with multiple intersecting marginalized identities, during major life
transitions (among other outcomes).
A major contribution of this line of research is The Major Life Events Taxonomy,
a new taxonomy of 121 major life events in 12 categories that researchers can use
to understand how life transitions people experience relate to their behaviors,
health and psychological outcomes, and technology use.
Selected Publications
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Oliver L. Haimson, AJ Carter, Shanley Corvite, Brookelyn Wheeler, Lingbo Wang, Tianxiao Liu, and Alexxus Lige.
2021. The Major Life Events Taxonomy: Social Readjustment, Social Media Information Sharing,
and Online Network Separation During Times of Life Transition.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
[open-access link] [PDF] [taxonomy]
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Ben Zefeng Zhang, Tianxiao Liu, Shanley Corvite, Nazanin Andalibi, and Oliver L. Haimson.
2022. Separate Online Networks During Life Transitions: Support, Identity, and
Challenges in Social Media and Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM
Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), (CSCW 2022), forthcoming.
[link] [PDF] [video]
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Oliver L. Haimson and Megh Marathe. 2022. Uncovering Personal Histories:
A Technology-Mediated Approach to Eliciting Reflection on Identity Transitions.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), (special issue on
(Re)Connecting History to the Theory and Praxis of HCI), forthcoming.
[link] [PDF] [video]
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Oliver L. Haimson, Tianxiao Liu, Ben Zefeng Zhang, and Shanley Corvite.
2021. The Online Authenticity Paradox: What Being "Authentic" on Social Media Means, and Barriers to Achieving It.
Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) (CSCW 2021).
[link] [PDF] [video]
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Oliver L. Haimson. 2018. Social Media as Social Transition Machinery.
Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) (CSCW 2018).
Honorable Mention Award
[link] [PDF] [blog]
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Oliver L. Haimson. 2019.
Mapping Gender Transition Sentiment Patterns via
Social Media Data: Toward Decreasing Transgender Mental Health Disparities.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) (special issue on Health Informatics and Health Equity:
Improving Our Reach and Impact).
[open-access link] [PDF] [blog]
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[my last name] at umich dot edu
Oliver Haimson
@transtechnologies
@oliverhaimson
Oliver Haimson
