School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China.
School of Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Commerce, Zhejiang Gongshang University Hangzhou College of Commerce, Hangzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2024 Jul 24;19(7):e0306698. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306698. eCollection 2024.
According to the Seventh National Census, China's fertility rate is less than 1.5, marking a significant national issue with potential risks. To counter this low birth rate, the Chinese government has relaxed family planning policies and introduced supportive measures.
Changes in birth policy have attracted considerable attention from the people of China. This article aims to study the public's response to the three-child support policy using Weibo as a window. The goal is to provide a more balanced evaluation of current perspectives, enabling policymakers to formulate better fertility information, particularly when anticipating a poor public response to controversial policies.
This research uses a crawler to gather data from Sina Weibo. Through opinion mining of Weibo posts on the three-child policy, Weibo users' online opinions on the three-child policy are analyzed from two perspectives: their attention content and sentiment tendency. Using an interrupted time series, it examines changes in online views on the policy, matching policy documents to the time nodes of Weibo posts.
The public has shown great interest in and provided short-term positive feedback on policies related to improving maternity insurance, birth rewards, and housing subsidies. In contrast, there has been a continuous negative response to policies such as extending maternity leave, which has particularly sparked concerns among women regarding future employment and marital rights protection. On social media, the public's attention to the three-child birth policy has focused mainly on the protection of women's rights, especially legal rights after childbirth, and issues related to physical and mental health. Child-rearing support and economic pressure are also hot topics, involving the daily expenses of multichild families, childcare services, and housing pressure. However, this study also revealed that infertile or single women express a strong desire to have children, but due to limitations in the personal medical insurance system, this desire has not been fully satisfied.
Our study demonstrates the feasibility of a rapid and flexible method for evaluating the public response to various three-child supportive policies in China using near real-time social media data. This information can help policy makers anticipate public responses to future pandemic three-child policies and ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to addressing increases in negative sentiment and levels of disagreement in the face of scientifically informed but controversial, restrictions.
根据第七次全国人口普查，中国的生育率低于 1.5，这是一个具有潜在风险的重大国家问题。为了应对低出生率，中国政府放宽了计划生育政策并引入了支持措施。
生育政策的变化引起了中国民众的广泛关注。本文旨在以微博为窗口，研究公众对三孩支持政策的反应。目的是通过使用微博数据，更全面地评估当前的观点，为政策制定者提供更好的生育信息，特别是在预测公众对有争议政策的反应不佳时。
本研究使用爬虫从新浪微博上收集数据。通过对微博上三孩政策相关帖子的意见挖掘，从关注内容和情绪倾向两个角度分析了微博用户对三孩政策的网络意见。利用中断时间序列，结合微博帖子的时间节点，检验了政策变化对在线观点的影响。
公众对提高生育保险、生育奖励和住房补贴相关政策表现出了极大的兴趣，并提供了短期的积极反馈。相比之下，延长产假等政策则持续引发负面反应，尤其是女性对未来就业和婚姻权利保护的担忧。在社交媒体上，公众对三孩生育政策的关注主要集中在妇女权益保护方面，特别是产后法律权益以及身心健康问题。育儿支持和经济压力也是热门话题，涉及多子女家庭的日常开支、儿童保育服务和住房压力。然而，本研究还表明，不孕或单身女性强烈希望生育，但由于个人医疗保险制度的限制，这种愿望尚未得到充分满足。
本研究展示了使用近实时社交媒体数据快速灵活评估中国各种三孩支持政策公众反应的可行性。这些信息可以帮助政策制定者预测未来与疫情相关的三孩政策的公众反应，并确保在面对有科学依据但有争议的限制时，投入足够的资源来应对负面情绪的增加和分歧程度的提高。
