Al-Rawi Ahmed, Zemenchik Kiana
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
JMIR Form Res. 2022 Jul 14;6(7):e36268. doi: 10.2196/36268.
The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to various inequalities in global societies, highlighting discrepancies in terms of safety, accessibility, and overall health. In particular, sex workers are disproportionately at risk due to the nature of their work and the social stigma that comes alongside it.
This study examines how public social media can be used as a tool of professional and personal expression by sex workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to explore an underresearched topic by focusing on sex workers' experiences with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the social media platform Twitter. In particular, we aimed to find the main issues that sex workers discuss on social media in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A literature review followed by a qualitative analysis of 1458 (re)tweets from 22 sex worker Twitter accounts was used for this study. The tweets were qualitatively coded by theme through the use of intercoder reliability. Empirical, experimental, and observational studies were included in this review to provide context and support for our findings.
In total, 5 major categories were identified as a result of the content analysis used for this study: concerns (n=542, 37.2%), solicitation (n=336, 23.0%), herd mentality (n=231, 15.8%), humor (n=190, 13.0%), and blame (n=146, 10.0%). The concerns category was the most prominent category, which could be due to its multifaceted nature of including individual concerns, health issues, concerns for essential workers and businesses, as well as concerns about inequalities or intersectionality. When using gender as a control factor, the majority of the results were not noteworthy, save for the blame category, in which sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) were more likely to post content.
Though there has been an increase in the literature related to the experiences of sex workers, this paper recommends that future studies could benefit from further examining these 5 major categories through mixed methods research. Examining this phenomenon could recognize the challenges unique to this working community during the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially reduce the widespread stigma associated with sex work in general.
新冠疫情引发了人们对全球社会各种不平等现象的关注，凸显了在安全、可及性和整体健康方面的差异。特别是，性工作者因其工作性质以及随之而来的社会污名，面临着不成比例的风险。
本研究探讨在新冠疫情期间，公共社交媒体如何能被性工作者用作专业和个人表达的工具。我们旨在通过关注性工作者在社交媒体平台推特上应对新冠疫情的经历，来探索一个研究较少的话题。具体而言，我们旨在找出性工作者在社交媒体上讨论的与新冠疫情相关的主要问题。
本研究采用文献综述，随后对来自22个性工作者推特账户的1458条转发推文进行定性分析。通过使用编码员间信度，对推文按主题进行定性编码。本综述纳入了实证、实验和观察性研究，以为我们的研究结果提供背景和支持。
通过本研究使用的内容分析，共识别出5个主要类别：担忧（n = 542，37.2%）、招揽（n = 336，23.0%）、从众心理（n = 231，15.8%）、幽默（n = 190，13.0%）和指责（n = 146，10.0%）。担忧类别是最突出的类别，这可能是由于其多方面的性质，包括个人担忧、健康问题、对一线工作者和企业的担忧，以及对不平等或交叉性的担忧。将性别作为控制因素时，除了指责类别外，大多数结果并无显著差异，在指责类别中，性少数群体（SGMs）更有可能发布相关内容。
尽管与性工作者经历相关的文献有所增加，但本文建议未来的研究可通过混合方法研究进一步审视这5个主要类别，从中受益。审视这一现象可以认识到新冠疫情期间这个工作群体所特有的挑战，并有可能减少与性工作相关的普遍污名。
