Dataset Information

Applying linguistic methods to understanding smoking-related conversations on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: Social media, such as Twitter, have become major channels of communication and commentary on popular culture, including conversations on our nation's leading addiction: tobacco. The current study examined Twitter conversations following two tobacco-related events in the media: (1) President Obama's doctor announcing that he had quit smoking and (2) the release of a photograph of Miley Cyrus (a former Disney child star) smoking a cigarette. With a focus on high-profile individuals whose actions can draw public attention, we aimed to characterise tobacco-related conversations as an example of tobacco-related public discourse and to present a novel methodology for studying social media.Tweets were collected 11-13 November 2011 (President Obama) and 1-3 August 2011 (Miley Cyrus) and analysed for relative frequency of terms, a novel application of a linguistic methodology.The President Obama data set (N=2749 tweets) had conversations about him quitting tobacco as well as a preponderance of information on political activity, links to websites, racialised terms and mention of marijuana. Websites and terms about Obama's smoke-free status were most central to the conversation. In the Miley Cyrus data (N=4746 tweets), terms that occurred with the greatest relative frequency were positive, emotional and supportive of quitting (eg, love, and please), with words such as 'love' most central to the conversation.People are talking about tobacco-related issues on Twitter, and semantic network analysis can be used to characterise on-line conversations. Future interventions may be able to harness social media and major current events to raise awareness of smoking-related issues.

SUBMITTER: Sanders-Jackson A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4103964 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Applying linguistic methods to understanding smoking-related conversations on Twitter.

Sanders-Jackson Ashley A Brown Cati G CG Prochaska Judith J JJ

Tobacco control 20131113 2

<h4>Introduction</h4>Social media, such as Twitter, have become major channels of communication and commentary on popular culture, including conversations on our nation's leading addiction: tobacco. The current study examined Twitter conversations following two tobacco-related events in the media: (1) President Obama's doctor announcing that he had quit smoking and (2) the release of a photograph of Miley Cyrus (a former Disney child star) smoking a cigarette. With a focus on high-profile indivi ...[more]

PMID: 24227540

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundInfodemiology is an emerging field of research that utilizes user-generated health-related content, such as that found in social media, to help improve public health. Twitter has become an important venue for studying emerging patterns in health issues such as substance use because it can reflect trends in real-time and display messages generated directly by users, giving a uniquely personal voice to analyses. Over the past year, several states in the United States have passed legislation to legalize adult recreational use of cannabis and the federal government in Canada has done the same. There are few studies that examine the sentiment and content of tweets about cannabis since the recent legislative changes regarding cannabis have occurred in North America.ObjectiveTo examine differences in the sentiment and content of cannabis-related tweets by state cannabis laws, and to examine differences in sentiment between the United States and Canada between 2017 and 2019.MethodsIn total, 1,200,127 cannabis-related tweets were collected from January 1, 2017, to June 17, 2019, using the Twitter application programming interface. Tweets then were grouped geographically based on cannabis legal status (legal for adult recreational use, legal for medical use, and no legal use) in the locations from which the tweets came. Sentiment scoring for the tweets was done with VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner), and differences in sentiment for states with different cannabis laws were tested using Tukey adjusted two-sided pairwise comparisons. Topic analysis to determine the content of tweets was done using latent Dirichlet allocation in Python, using a Java implementation, LdaMallet, with Gensim wrapper.ResultsSignificant differences were seen in tweet sentiment between US states with different cannabis laws (P=.001 for negative sentiment tweets in fully illegal compared to legal for adult recreational use states), as well as between the United States and Canada (P=.003 for positive sentiment and P=.001 for negative sentiment). In both cases, restrictive state policy environments (eg, those where cannabis use is fully illegal, or legal for medical use only) were associated with more negative tweet sentiment than less restrictive policy environments (eg, where cannabis is legal for adult recreational use). Six key topics were found in recent US tweet contents: fun and recreation (keywords, eg, love, life, high); daily life (today, start, live); transactions (buy, sell, money); places of use (room, car, house); medical use and cannabis industry (business, industry, company); and legalization (legalize, police, tax). The keywords representing content of tweets also differed between the United States and Canada.ConclusionsKnowledge about how cannabis is being discussed online, and geographic differences that exist in these conversations may help to inform public health planning and prevention efforts. Public health education about how to use cannabis in ways that promote safety and minimize harms may be especially important in places where cannabis is legal for adult recreational and medical use.

Project description:BackgroundInsufficient recruitment of participants remains a critical roadblock to successful clinical research, particularly clinical trials. Social media provide new ways for connecting potential participants with research opportunities. Researchers suggest that the social network Twitter may serve as a rich avenue for exploring how patients communicate about their health issues and increasing enrollment in cancer clinical trials. However, there is a lack of evidence that Twitter offers practical utility and impact.ObjectiveThis pilot study aimed to examine the feasibility and impact of using Twitter monitoring data (ie, user activity and their conversations about cancer-related conditions and concerns expressed by Twitter users in Los Angeles County) as a tool for enhancing clinical trial recruitment at a comprehensive cancer center.MethodsWe will conduct a mixed-methods interrupted time series study design with a before-and-after social media recruitment intervention. On the basis of a preliminary analysis of eligible trials, we plan to onboard at least 84 clinical trials across 6 disease categories: breast cancer, colon cancer, kidney cancer, lymphoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and prostate cancer that are open to accrual at the University of Southern California (USC) Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. We will monitor messages about these 6 cancer conditions posted by Twitter users in Los Angeles County. Recruitment for the trials will occur through the Twitter account (@USCTrials). Primary study outcomes-feasibility and acceptance of the social media intervention among targeted Twitter users and the study teams of the onboarded trials-will be assessed using qualitative interviews and the 4-point Likert scale and by calculating the proportion of targeted Twitter users who engaged with outreach messages. Second, impact of the social media intervention will be measured by calculating the proportion of enrollees in trials. The enrollment rate will be compared between the active intervention period and the prior 10 months as historical control for each disease trial group. This study has been funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science through a Clinical and Translational Science Award. Study approval was obtained from the clinical investigations committee at USC Norris and the institutional review board at USC.ResultsRecruitment on Twitter started in February 2018. Data collection will be completed in November 2018.ConclusionsThis pilot project will provide preliminary data and practical insight into the application of publicly available Twitter data to identify and recruit clinical trial participants across 6 cancer disease types. We will shed light on the acceptance of the social media intervention among Twitter users and study team members of the onboarded trials. If successful, the findings will inform a multisite randomized controlled trial to determine the efficacy of the social media intervention across different locations and populations.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT03408561; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03408561 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/72LihauzW).Registered report identifierRR1-10.2196/9762.

Project description:BackgroundWithin the cultures and societies of the United States, topics related to death and dying continue to be taboo, and as a result, opportunities for presence and engagement during the end of life, which could lead to a good death, are avoided. Several efforts have been made to help people engage in advance care planning (ACP) conversations, including completing advance care directives so that they may express their goals of care if they become too sick to communicate their wishes. A major effort in the United States toward encouraging such challenging discussions is the annual celebration of the National Healthcare Decisions Day.ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore ACP from a sociocultural perspective by using Twitter as a communication tool.MethodsAll publicly available tweets published between August 1, 2020, and July 30, 2021 (N=9713) were collected and analyzed using the computational mixed methods Analysis of Topic Model Network approach.ResultsThe results revealed that conversations driven primarily by laypersons (7107/7410, 95.91% of tweets originated from unverified accounts) surrounded the following three major themes: importance and promotion, surrounding language, and systemic issues.ConclusionsOn the basis of the results, we argue that there is a need for awareness of the barriers that people may face when engaging in ACP conversations, including systemic barriers, literacy levels, misinformation, policies (including Medicare reimbursements), and trust among health care professionals, in the United States. This is incredibly important for clinicians and scholars worldwide to be aware of as we strive to re-envision ACP, so that people are more comfortable engaging in ACP conversations. In terms of the content of tweets, we argue that there is a chasm between the biomedical and biopsychosocial elements of ACP, including patient narratives. If used properly, Twitter conversations and National Health Care Decision Day hashtags could be harnessed to serve as a connecting point among organizations, physicians, patients, and family members to lay the groundwork for the trajectory toward a good death.

Dataset Information

Applying linguistic methods to understanding smoking-related conversations on Twitter.

Publications

Applying linguistic methods to understanding smoking-related conversations on Twitter.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets