Job Satisfaction Through the Lens of Social Media: Rural--Urban Patterns in the U.S

TL;DR

This study uses social media data and machine learning to measure and compare job satisfaction across rural and urban U.S. counties, revealing that labor market conditions influence perceived work well-being.

Contribution

It introduces a novel social-media-based measure of job satisfaction and links it to labor market conditions, highlighting the impact of unemployment on rural-urban satisfaction gaps.

Findings

Rural counties report lower job satisfaction than urban counties.

The rural-urban satisfaction gap narrows during tight labor markets.

Perceived job quality converges when unemployment is low.

Abstract

We analyze a novel large-scale social-media-based measure of U.S. job satisfaction, constructed by applying a fine-tuned large language model to 2.6 billion georeferenced tweets, and link it to county-level labor market conditions (2013-2023). Logistic regressions show that rural counties consistently report lower job satisfaction sentiment than urban ones, but this gap decreases under tight labor markets. In contrast to widening rural-urban income disparities, perceived job quality converges when unemployment is low, suggesting that labor market slack, not income alone, drives spatial inequality in subjective work-related well-being.