Facebook has the answer for what we are most thankful for in each state

Over the past few months, many people have been challenging one another to share on Facebook the things for which they are most grateful. So, for example, one friend might challenge another to “write 3 things you are thankful for over the next 5 days.” In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we thought we would see what people are most thankful for.

The following analysis was conducted on anonymized, aggregate data by English speakers in the United States.

We started by collecting a set of anonymized English status updates that contained “grateful” or “thankful,” as well as the word “day” preceded or followed by a number. These status updates were then aggregated and processed by a text-clustering algorithm so we could identify what people were grateful for.

One of the first things we discovered is that the people who participated in this challenge were overwhelmingly women: 90% of people who participated identified as female on their profile. There are a number of explanations for why this might be: women may be more likely to participate in challenges such as this; women may be more likely to nominate other women than men; women may be more willing to share what they are grateful for on Facebook; etc. To be clear, we think it is unlikely that women are actually more grateful than men.

So now, without further ado, we present the top 10 things people are thankful for (See picture to left of this article under related content).

The #1 thing people on Facebook are most thankful for? Friends! Also in the top ten are “family and friends,” “husband,” “children,” and “daughter.” It appears that we are most thankful for the people we are closest to. In this figure, and the other bar charts that follow, blue bars indicate other people.

We also looked at what topics are most distinctive for each state.

Notable are weather patterns during the summer and fall when the gratitude challenge was most popular — people in the southwest are grateful for much-needed rain, those in the midwest for summer thunderstorms, residents of Minnesota and Connecticut love the fall colors, and balmy Hawaii and Louisiana are grateful for rainbows.

Why is Michigan grateful for electricity? We think it may be because heavy summer storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of houses right around the challenge.

New Yorkers are thankful for their apartments, those on the Eastern seaboard for the beach, Oregonians for yoga, and much of the South for religion and God.

Social media makes an appearance, too (Pinterest! Netflix! Google! YouTube!). Facebook was mentioned more often than any other form of social media and uniformly enough to not show up on the map for any particular state.

For a very detailed report, go to http://on.fb.me/1FxpEOA

Source: Facebook