In times of increasing crises and disasters, the use of social media to share one's own impressions, hopes, wishes and fears, to enter into dialogue with others and to offer or seek help is also growing. This offers enormous potential for crisis management and the creation of situation reports on the needs and resources of the population in times of crisis, but also presents a variety of challenges.

The #sosmap project is investigating how such psychosocial needs and resources in crisis situations are presented in social media and how they can be meaningfully analysed and used for crisis management so that affected people receive appropriate support quickly and motivated people can offer their support accordingly. The project is being led by the Chair of Civil Protection, Disaster Relief and Property Security at the University of Wuppertal.

The Chair of Health and Prevention at the University of Greifswald is focusing on the development and testing of a categorisation grid for psychosocial needs and resources in social media based on the systematic analysis of specialist literature as well as qualitative interviews and Delphi surveys of experts from the fields of civil protection and disaster relief (e.g. psychosocial emergency care) as well as psychological, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic counselling and care. The findings of the qualitative work will be triangulated in the project with quantitative analyses from the University of Wuppertal and finally transferred into framework recommendations for stakeholders and discussed with them.

The project is funded and supported by the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) as part of the programme ‘Evaluation of social media with regard to the psychosocial needs of the population in crises and disasters’ (number 0013).