Nuclear Engineering Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, United States of America.
Department of Health Care Policy Research, Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, Sejong-si, Korea.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 30;17(8):e0272558. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272558. eCollection 2022.
This study examines the contents of official communication from United States governors' offices related to the COVID-19 pandemic to assess patterns in communication and to determine if they correlate with trends for COVID cases and deaths.
We collected text data for all COVID-19 related press releases between March 1 and December 31, 2020 from the US governors' office websites in all 50 states. An automated parsing and sentiment analyzer assessed descriptive statistics and trends in tone, including positivity and negativity.
We included a total of 7,720 press releases in this study. We found that both positive and negative sentiments were homogenous across states at the beginning of the pandemic but became heterogeneous as the pandemic evolved. The same trend applied to the frequency and tone of press releases. Sentiments across states were overall positive with a small level of negativity. We observed a reactive official communication to the evolution of the number of COVID-19 cases rather than responsive or preventive.
The findings of both positivity and negativity in press communications suggest that the effect of discounted importance was present in official communications. Our findings support a state-dependent optimal communication frequency and tone, agreeing with the curvilinear communication model of organizational theory and implying that feedback cycles between government officials and public response should be shortened to rapidly maximize communication efficacy during the pandemic. Future research should identify and evaluate the drivers of the large differences in communication tone across states and validate the reactive characteristics of COVID-19 official communications.
本研究考察了美国州长办公室与 COVID-19 大流行相关的官方通讯内容，以评估通讯模式，并确定它们是否与 COVID 病例和死亡趋势相关。
我们从美国 50 个州的州长办公室网站上收集了 2020 年 3 月 1 日至 12 月 31 日期间所有与 COVID-19 相关的新闻稿的文本数据。自动解析和情感分析器评估了语气的描述性统计数据和趋势，包括积极性和消极性。
本研究共纳入 7720 篇新闻稿。我们发现，在大流行开始时，积极和消极情绪在各州都是同质的，但随着大流行的发展，它们变得异质。这一趋势同样适用于新闻稿的频率和语气。各州的情绪总体上是积极的，只有少量的消极情绪。我们观察到对 COVID-19 病例数量演变的反应性官方沟通，而不是响应性或预防性沟通。
新闻通讯中积极和消极情绪的发现表明，折扣重要性的影响在官方通讯中存在。我们的研究结果支持州际最优沟通频率和语气的存在，符合组织理论的曲线沟通模型，并暗示政府官员和公众反应之间的反馈循环应该缩短，以在大流行期间迅速最大限度地提高沟通效果。未来的研究应该确定和评估各州之间沟通语气差异的驱动因素，并验证 COVID-19 官方沟通的反应性特征。
