Cristiane Melchior

I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the Disinformation, Propaganda & Soft Power Research Lab (DPS-Lab). My research interests revolve around data science applied to social subjects, especially fake news, propaganda, disinformation topics, health, soft power, and East Asian TV dramas and films. 

I obtained my Ph.D. at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in 2023, with a period as a visiting student at HEC Montréal, Canada. My thesis was entitled “Fake News on Social Media Platforms in the Context of Rumor Theory: the Case of Covid-19”. I also hold a master’s degree in Production Engineering and a specialization in Statistics from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM).

Methodological skills

I have a strong quantitative and statistical background. Some of the data analysis methods that I use are time series analysis and forecasting, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), correlation analysis, regression analysis, cosine similarity, Structural Topic Modeling (STM), sentiment analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

My quantitative background is complemented by my software skills, which include R, R Markdown, SPSS, SmartPLS, IRaMuTeQ, QualCoder, fsQCA, and Python.

Selected publications

Melchior, C., & Oliveira, M. (2024). A systematic literature review of the motivations to share fake news on social media platforms and how to fight them. New Media & Society, 26(2), 1127-1150.

Melchior, C., & Oliveira, M. (2022). Health-related fake news on social media platforms: A systematic literature review. New Media & Society, 24(6), 1500-1522.

Melchior, C., Zanini, R. R., Guerra, R. R., & Rockenbach, D. A. (2021). Forecasting Brazilian mortality rates due to occupational accidents using autoregressive moving average approaches. International Journal of Forecasting, 37(2), 825-837.

Melchior, C., & Zanini, R. R. (2019). Mortality per work accident: A literature mapping. Safety Science, 114, 72-78.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​