Department of Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Public Health, University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain.
Computational Social Science DataLab, University Research Institute on Social Sciences, University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain.
Front Public Health. 2022 Jun 23;10:857531. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.857531. eCollection 2022.
National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it publishes content on social media and news aimed to raise awareness of eating disorders. Measuring the impact of these actions is vital for maximizing the effectiveness of such interventions. This study is an effort to empirically measure the change in behavior of users who engage with NEDAwareness content, and compare the detected changes between campaigns in two different years. We analyze a total of 35,895 tweets generated during two campaigns of NEDAwareness campaigns in 2019 and 2020. In order to assess the reach of each campaign, we consider the users participating in the campaigns and their number of followers, as well as retweeting engagement. We use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text modeling and causal impact analysis in order to gauge the change in self-expression of users who have interacted with the NEDAwareness content, compared to a baseline group of users. We further enrich our understanding of the users by extracting gender information from their display names. We find that, despite large media corporations (such as MTV and Teen Vogue) participating in the campaign, it is governmental and nonprofit accounts who are among the accounts that attract the most retweets. Whereas the most influential accounts were well-connected in 2019, the 2020 campaign saw little retweeting between such accounts, negatively impacting the reach of the material. Both campaigns engaged women at around 40% and men 17%, supporting previous research showing women to be more likely to share their experiences with eating disorders. Further, women were more likely to mention other health topics within the 15 days of the intervention, including pregnancy and abortion, as well as depression and anxiety, and to discuss the developing COVID pandemic in 2020. Despite the positive message of the campaign, we find that the users who have engaged with this content were more likely to mention the linguistic categories concerning anxiety and risk. Thus, we illustrate the complex, gender-specific effects of NEDAwareness online health intervention campaign on the continued self-expression of its audience and provide actionable insights for potential improvement of such public health efforts.
美国国家饮食失调协会（National Eating Disorders Association）每年都会举办一次 NEDAwareness 周，在此期间，它会在社交媒体和新闻上发布有关饮食失调的内容，以提高公众对此类疾病的认知。衡量这些行动的影响对于最大限度地提高此类干预措施的效果至关重要。本研究旨在通过实证方法衡量与 NEDAwareness 内容互动的用户行为的变化，并比较在两年中不同活动的变化。我们分析了 2019 年和 2020 年两次 NEDAwareness 活动中产生的总共 35895 条推文。为了评估每个活动的影响力，我们考虑了参与活动的用户及其关注者数量以及转发参与度。我们使用语言查询和词汇计数（Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count，LIWC）文本建模和因果影响分析来衡量与 NEDAwareness 内容互动的用户的自我表达变化，与一个基线组用户进行比较。我们通过从他们的显示名称中提取性别信息，进一步丰富了对用户的理解。我们发现，尽管有大型媒体公司（如 MTV 和 Teen Vogue）参与了该活动，但吸引最多转发的账户是政府和非营利组织账户。尽管 2019 年最有影响力的账户之间联系紧密，但 2020 年的活动中，这些账户之间几乎没有转发，这对材料的影响力产生了负面影响。两次活动都吸引了约 40%的女性和 17%的男性，这支持了之前的研究，即女性更有可能分享自己的饮食失调经历。此外，女性在干预后的 15 天内更有可能提到其他健康话题，包括怀孕和堕胎，以及抑郁和焦虑，以及在 2020 年讨论新冠疫情的发展。尽管该活动传递了积极的信息，但我们发现与该内容互动的用户更有可能提到与焦虑和风险相关的语言类别。因此，我们说明了 NEDAwareness 在线健康干预活动对其受众持续自我表达的复杂、性别特定影响，并为此类公共卫生工作的潜在改进提供了可行的见解。
