Wang Yuan, Chen Yonghao
Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
J Commun Healthc. 2023 Mar;16(1):103-112. doi: 10.1080/17538068.2022.2054196. Epub 2022 Mar 24.
Evidence-based health communication is crucial for facilitating vaccine-related knowledge and addressing vaccine hesitancy. To that end, it is important to understand the discourses about COVID-19 vaccination and attend to the publics' emotions underlying those discourses.
We collect tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines from March 2020 to March 2021. In total, 304,292 tweets from 134,015 users are collected. We conduct a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling analysis and a sentiment analysis to analyze the discourse themes and sentiments.
This study identifies seven themes of COVID-19 vaccine-related discourses. Vaccine advocacy (24.82%) is the most widely discussed topic about COVID-19 vaccines, followed by vaccine hesitancy (22.29%), vaccine rollout (12.99%), vaccine facts (12.61%), recognition for healthcare workers (12.47%), vaccine side effects (10.07%), and vaccine policies (4.75%). Trust is the most salient emotion associated with COVID-19 vaccine discourses, followed by anticipation, fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Among the seven topics, vaccine advocacy tweets are most likely to receive likes and comments, and vaccine fact tweets are most likely to receive retweets.
When talking about vaccines, publics' emotions are dominated by trust and anticipation, yet mixed with fear and sadness. Although tweets about vaccine hesitancy are prevalent on Twitter, those messages receive fewer likes and comments than vaccine advocacy messages. Over time, tweets about vaccine advocacy and vaccine facts become more dominant whereas tweets about vaccine hesitancy become less dominant among COVID-19 vaccine discourses, suggesting that publics become more confident about COVID-19 vaccines as they obtain more information.
基于证据的健康传播对于促进疫苗相关知识和解决疫苗犹豫问题至关重要。为此，了解有关新冠疫苗接种的话语并关注这些话语背后公众的情绪非常重要。
我们收集了2020年3月至2021年3月期间与新冠疫苗相关的推文。总共收集了来自134,015名用户的304,292条推文。我们进行了潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）建模分析和情感分析，以分析话语主题和情感。
本研究确定了与新冠疫苗相关话语的七个主题。疫苗宣传（24.82%）是关于新冠疫苗讨论最广泛的话题，其次是疫苗犹豫（22.29%）、疫苗推广（12.99%）、疫苗事实（12.61%）、对医护人员的认可（12.47%）、疫苗副作用（10.07%）和疫苗政策（4.75%）。信任是与新冠疫苗话语最显著相关的情绪，其次是期待、恐惧、喜悦、悲伤、愤怒、惊讶和厌恶。在这七个主题中，疫苗宣传推文最有可能获得点赞和评论，而疫苗事实推文最有可能获得转发。
在谈论疫苗时，公众的情绪以信任和期待为主，但也夹杂着恐惧和悲伤。尽管关于疫苗犹豫的推文在推特上很普遍，但这些信息获得的点赞和评论比疫苗宣传信息要少。随着时间的推移，在新冠疫苗话语中，关于疫苗宣传和疫苗事实的推文变得更加占主导地位，而关于疫苗犹豫的推文则变得不那么占主导地位，这表明公众在获得更多信息后对新冠疫苗更有信心。
