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Keeping up with the times: how national public health and governmental organizations communicate about cannabis on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Public health and governmental organizations are expected to provide guidance to the public on emerging health issues in accessible formats. It is, therefore, important to examine how such organizations are discussing cannabis online and the information that is being provided to the public about this increasingly legal and available substance. METHODS:This paper presents a concise thematic analysis of both the volume and content of cannabis-related health information from selected (n =?13) national-level public health and governmental organizations in Canada and the U.S. on Twitter. RESULTS:There were eight themes identified in Tweets including 1) health-related topics; 2) legalization and legislation; 3) research on cannabis; 4) special populations; 5) driving and cannabis; 6) population issues; 7) medical cannabis, and 8) public health issues. The majority of cannabis-related Tweets from the organizations studied came from relatively few organizations and there were substantial differences between the topics covered by U.S. and Canadian organizations. The organizations studied provided limited information regarding how to use cannabis in ways that will minimize health-related harms. CONCLUSIONS:Authoritative organizations that deal with public health may consider designing timely social media communications with emerging cannabis-related information, to benefit a general public otherwise exposed to primarily pro-cannabis content on Twitter.

SUBMITTER: van Draanen J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6739954 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Keeping up with the times: how national public health and governmental organizations communicate about cannabis on Twitter.

van Draanen Jenna J Krishna Tanvi T Tsang Christie C Liu Sam S

Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy 20190912 1

<h4>Background</h4>Public health and governmental organizations are expected to provide guidance to the public on emerging health issues in accessible formats. It is, therefore, important to examine how such organizations are discussing cannabis online and the information that is being provided to the public about this increasingly legal and available substance.<h4>Methods</h4>This paper presents a concise thematic analysis of both the volume and content of cannabis-related health information fr ...[more]

PMID: 31511026

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Project description:Introduction: Personas are based on real-life typologies of people that can be used to create characters and messages to communicate important health information through relatable narrative storylines. Persona development is data-driven and can involve multiple phases of formative research and evaluation; however, personas are largely underutilized in digital health research. The purpose of this study was to create and document persona development to deliver narrative-focused health education for parents on Twitter with the goal of increasing uptake of HPV vaccination among adolescents. Methods: Leveraging data from a mixed-method study conducted in the U.S. with a diverse population of parents with adolescents ages 9-14, we used both qualitative and quantitative data (e.g., the National Immunization Survey-Teen, focus groups, and social media) to create personas. These data sources were used to identify and develop key characteristics for personas to reflect a range of parents and their diverse understandings and experiences related to HPV vaccination. A parent advisory board provided insight and helped refine persona development. Results: Four personas emerged and were characterized as the (1) Informed Altruist, (2) Real Talker, (3) Information Gatherer, and (4) Supporter. Characteristics differed across personas and provided insights into targeted narrative strategies. Described attributes included demographics, psychographics, communication style, vaccine goals and aspirations, vaccine challenges and frustrations, and vaccine hesitancy. Discussion: This work demonstrates how multiple data sources can be used to create personas to deliver social media messages that can address the diverse preferences and needs of parents for HPV vaccine information. With increasing usage of social media for health information among parents, it is important for researchers to consider marketing and design thinking to create health communication messages that resonate with audiences.

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.

Dataset Information

Keeping up with the times: how national public health and governmental organizations communicate about cannabis on Twitter.

Publications

Keeping up with the times: how national public health and governmental organizations communicate about cannabis on Twitter.

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