Division of Methodologies Research, Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care, King's College London, London, UK.
Medical Education Research Unit, School of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Health Expect. 2022 Feb;25(1):149-162. doi: 10.1111/hex.13359. Epub 2021 Sep 20.
The early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic prompted unprecedented displays of gratitude to healthcare workers. In the United Kingdom, gratitude was a hotly debated topic in public discourse, catalysing compelling displays of civic togetherness but also attracting criticism for being an unhelpful distraction that authorized unrealistic expectations of healthcare workers. Expressions of thanks tend to be neglected as drivers of transformation, and yet, they are important indicators of qualities to which people attach significance.
This study aimed to use discursive analysis to explore how the National Health Service (NHS) was constructed in attention-attracting tweets that expressed and/or discussed gratitude to the NHS.
Having determined that Twitter was the most active site for traffic relating to gratitude and the NHS, we established a corpus of 834 most-liked tweets, purposively sampled from Twitter searches on a day-by-day basis over the period of the first lockdown in the United Kingdom (22 March-28 May 2020). We developed a typology for tweets engaging with gratitude as well as analysing what the NHS was thanked for.
Our analysis, informed by a discursive psychology approach, found that the meanings attributed to gratitude were highly mobile and there were distinct patterns of activity. The NHS was predominantly-and sometimes idealistically-thanked for working, effort, saving and caring. Displays of gratitude were seen as incommensurable with failures of responsibility. The clap-for-carers campaign was a potent driver of affect, especially in the early parts of the lockdown.
The social value of gratitude is implicated in the re-evaluation of the risks and rewards of healthcare and social care work in the wake of the pandemic. We caution against cynicism about gratitude overshadowing the well-being effects that expressing and receiving gratitude can engender, particularly given concerns over the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health.
This study involves the analysis of data provided by the public and published on social media.
2019 年冠状病毒病大流行的早期阶段促使人们对医护人员表示前所未有的感谢。在英国，感激之情是公众话语中热议的话题，它激发了强烈的公民团结意识，但也因被指责为毫无帮助的分散注意力的行为而受到批评，这种行为使人们对医护人员产生了不切实际的期望。感谢的表达往往被忽视为变革的驱动力，但它们是人们重视的品质的重要指标。
本研究旨在使用话语分析来探讨在表达和/或讨论对国民保健制度（NHS）感激之情的引人关注的推文中，NHS 是如何构建的。
Twitter 是与感激之情和 NHS 相关的最活跃的网站，我们确定了这一点，然后从英国第一次封锁期间（2020 年 3 月 22 日至 5 月 28 日）每天的 Twitter 搜索中，有针对性地抽取了 834 条最受欢迎的推文，建立了一个语料库。我们为参与感激之情的推文制定了一个分类法，并分析了 NHS 感谢的内容。
我们的分析受到话语心理学方法的启发，发现赋予感激之情的意义是高度流动的，而且存在明显的活动模式。NHS 主要是-有时是理想主义地-感谢其工作、努力、拯救和关怀。对责任失败的感激之情被视为不可比拟的。为照顾者鼓掌的活动是情感的有力驱动因素，尤其是在封锁的早期阶段。
在大流行之后，对医疗和社会保健工作的风险和回报的重新评估涉及到感激之情的社会价值。我们告诫不要对感激之情的讽刺盖过表达和接受感激之情所产生的幸福感影响，特别是考虑到大流行对心理健康的不利影响。
本研究涉及对公众提供并在社交媒体上发布的数据进行分析。
