Publications and Presentations
Sun, Q. & Zhang, J. (2018, May). What Do People Talk about When They Tweet about HPV? Semantic and Sentiment Analyses of HPV and Cervical Cancer-Related Tweets. Paper accepted at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Health Communication Division, Prague, Czech Republic.
Project Summary
Despite of an increasing number of national initiatives and communication campaigns to increase awareness and adoption of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, the uptake of the HPV vaccine remains low. Besides traditional sources of medical advice, people tend to seek additional information on social media for health-related decision-making. Twitter, as a popular social media platform, provides all kinds of information related to cervical cancer and HPV, including news reports, scientific articles, organizational campaigns, and first-hand personal narratives and experiences. Examining the nature and breadth of HPV-related contents on Twitter expands our understanding of how medical information is circulated on social media and informs the creation and testing of specific cancer prevention messages for social media.
The goal of this project is to analyze (1) who circulate cervical cancer and HPV related information on Twitter; (2) what are the main topics emerging from the tweets discussing cervical cancer and HPV; (3) whether and how do topics change over time; and (4) what sentiments are underlying the identified topics.
Methodology
We obtained a random sample of 10% of all tweets from 2009 to 2015 as provided by Twitter’s Gardenhose stream. The archive contained approximately 350,000 unique HPV related tweets. We apply semantic network analysis and sentiment analyses to examine the tweets.
Related Resources
Ruiz, J.B. and G.A. Barnett, Exploring the presentation of HPV information online: A semantic network analysis of websites. Vaccine, 2015. 33(29): p. 3354-3359.
Sun, Q. & Zhang, J. (2018, May). What Do People Talk about When They Tweet about HPV? Semantic and Sentiment Analyses of HPV and Cervical Cancer-Related Tweets. Paper accepted at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Health Communication Division, Prague, Czech Republic.
Project Summary
Despite of an increasing number of national initiatives and communication campaigns to increase awareness and adoption of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, the uptake of the HPV vaccine remains low. Besides traditional sources of medical advice, people tend to seek additional information on social media for health-related decision-making. Twitter, as a popular social media platform, provides all kinds of information related to cervical cancer and HPV, including news reports, scientific articles, organizational campaigns, and first-hand personal narratives and experiences. Examining the nature and breadth of HPV-related contents on Twitter expands our understanding of how medical information is circulated on social media and informs the creation and testing of specific cancer prevention messages for social media.
The goal of this project is to analyze (1) who circulate cervical cancer and HPV related information on Twitter; (2) what are the main topics emerging from the tweets discussing cervical cancer and HPV; (3) whether and how do topics change over time; and (4) what sentiments are underlying the identified topics.
Methodology
We obtained a random sample of 10% of all tweets from 2009 to 2015 as provided by Twitter’s Gardenhose stream. The archive contained approximately 350,000 unique HPV related tweets. We apply semantic network analysis and sentiment analyses to examine the tweets.
Related Resources
Ruiz, J.B. and G.A. Barnett, Exploring the presentation of HPV information online: A semantic network analysis of websites. Vaccine, 2015. 33(29): p. 3354-3359.
