IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jijerp/v17y2020i10p3464-d358685.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Studying Public Perception about Vaccination: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

Author

Listed:
  • Viju Raghupathi

    (Koppelman School of Business, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY 11210, USA)

  • Jie Ren

    (Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York, NY 10023, USA)

  • Wullianallur Raghupathi

    (Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York, NY 10023, USA)

Abstract

Text analysis has been used by scholars to research attitudes toward vaccination and is particularly timely due to the rise of medical misinformation via social media. This study uses a sample of 9581 vaccine-related tweets in the period 1 January 2019 to 5 April 2019. The time period is of the essence because during this time, a measles outbreak was prevalent throughout the United States and a public debate was raging. Sentiment analysis is applied to the sample, clustering the data into topics using the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique. The analyses suggest that most (about 77%) of the tweets focused on the search for new/better vaccines for diseases such as the Ebola virus, human papillomavirus (HPV), and the flu. Of the remainder, about half concerned the recent measles outbreak in the United States, and about half were part of ongoing debates between supporters and opponents of vaccination against measles in particular. While these numbers currently suggest a relatively small role for vaccine misinformation, the concept of herd immunity puts that role in context. Nevertheless, going forward, health experts should consider the potential for the increasing spread of falsehoods that may get firmly entrenched in the public mind.

Suggested Citation

  • Viju Raghupathi & Jie Ren & Wullianallur Raghupathi, 2020. "Studying Public Perception about Vaccination: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(10), pages 1-23, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:10:p:3464-:d:358685
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/10/3464/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/10/3464/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Viju Raghupathi & Yilu Zhou & Wullianallur Raghupathi, 2019. "Exploring Big Data Analytic Approaches to Cancer Blog Text Analysis," International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics (IJHISI), IGI Global, vol. 14(4), pages 1-20, October.
    2. Sobo, Elisa J., 2016. "What is herd immunity, and how does it relate to pediatric vaccination uptake? US parent perspectives," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 187-195.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wullianallur Raghupathi & Sarah Jinhui Wu & Viju Raghupathi, 2023. "Understanding Corporate Sustainability Disclosures from the Securities Exchange Commission Filings," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(5), pages 1-32, February.
    2. Charlotte Roe & Madison Lowe & Benjamin Williams & Clare Miller, 2021. "Public Perception of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccinations on Social Media: Questionnaire and Sentiment Analysis," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(24), pages 1-21, December.
    3. Wullianallur Raghupathi & Dominik Molitor & Viju Raghupathi & Aditya Saharia, 2023. "Identifying Key Issues in Climate Change Litigation: A Machine Learning Text Analytic Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(23), pages 1-30, December.
    4. Liwei Zhang & Kelin Chen & He Jiang & Ji Zhao, 2020. "How the Health Rumor Misleads People’s Perception in a Public Health Emergency: Lessons from a Purchase Craze during the COVID-19 Outbreak in China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(19), pages 1-15, October.
    5. Eva L. Jenkins & Dickson Lukose & Linda Brennan & Annika Molenaar & Tracy A. McCaffrey, 2023. "Exploring Food Waste Conversations on Social Media: A Sentiment, Emotion, and Topic Analysis of Twitter Data," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(18), pages 1-26, September.
    6. Samar Binkheder & Raniah N. Aldekhyyel & Alanoud AlMogbel & Nora Al-Twairesh & Nuha Alhumaid & Shahad N. Aldekhyyel & Amr A. Jamal, 2021. "Public Perceptions around mHealth Applications during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Network and Sentiment Analysis of Tweets in Saudi Arabia," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(24), pages 1-22, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wullianallur Raghupathi & Dominik Molitor & Viju Raghupathi & Aditya Saharia, 2023. "Identifying Key Issues in Climate Change Litigation: A Machine Learning Text Analytic Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(23), pages 1-30, December.
    2. Viju Raghupathi & Jie Ren & Wullianallur Raghupathi, 2020. "Identifying Corporate Sustainability Issues by Analyzing Shareholder Resolutions: A Machine-Learning Text Analytics Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(11), pages 1-24, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:10:p:3464-:d:358685. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.