Twitter Perspectives on Cochlear Implantation: Sentiment and Thematic Analysis.

OBJECTIVE

To identify themes that contribute to the most positive and negative perspectives of cochlear implants (CIs) on Twitter.

STUDY DESIGN

A cross-sectional qualitative study.

SETTING

Social media (Twitter).

METHODS

In this study, all English-language original tweets mentioning "cochlear implant" from 2019 to 2021 were collected from Twitter's Academic Research Database using a custom Python script. Sentiment analysis was performed using VADER, a sentiment analysis tool built to analyze the inherent positivity or negativity of social media posts. Tweets were quantitatively sorted by compound sentiment score (range -1 [most negative] to 1 [most positive]). Thematic analysis based on grounded theory was performed on the most positive, negative, and "liked" tweets.

RESULTS

Of the 19,376 tweets included, the average (standard deviation) compound sentiment score was 0.21 (0.46). A total of 10,375 (53.5%) tweets had a positive tone, 4965 (25.6%) were neutral and 4036 (20.8%) were negative. Of the 100 most negative tweets, the most prominent themes were media representation (21.9%), the controversy of CI within the Deaf community (19.8%), and unrelated to direct patient experience (16.7%). Of the 100 most positive tweets, the most prominent themes were tweets of happiness and support (25.0%), tweets unrelated to direct patient experience (18.0%), and tweets about hearing new sounds (10.0%).

CONCLUSION

While the majority of tweets on CI carried a positive tone, there are ongoing challenges with the stigma surrounding CI. Public perspectives of CI on social media may help clinicians counsel CI patients and elucidate issues that lead to newfound acceptance or ongoing stigma of CI in the general population.