Elsevier

Journal of Business Research

Volume 140, February 2022, Pages 384-393
Journal of Business Research

Sociocultural factors during COVID-19 pandemic: Information consumption on Twitter

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The information concerning the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic is relevant for Society.

  • Twitter is the social network most used to express opinions related to the pandemic.

  • The lexicon used in messages depends on the meaning that users give to the information they consume in communication channels.

  • Message content influences sociocultural factors.

  • Messages written in different languages ​​do not necessarily influence social factors.

  • The model that describes cultural factors allows comparing sociocultural contexts derived from studies on social domains.

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to describe the sociocultural factors that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is used as an instrument for data collection. The study is qualitative and uses the netnographic method. To analyze the flow of messages posted on Twitter, the model proposed by Perez-Cepeda and Arias-Bolzmann (2020), which describes sociocultural factors, is taken as a basis. The semantics that people use are a type of functional knowledge that reveals sociocultural factors. Sentiments were analyzed through lexicon-based methods, which are the most suitable. The categorization and classification of the data are performed based on the information that users post on Twitter. The tweets related to COVID-19 describe the sociocultural issues and the level of sentiment around the pandemic. The discussion centers on the COVID-19 pandemic, information consumption, lexicon, sociocultural factors and sentiment analysis. The study was limited to the social media Twitter; another limitation was not to consider the social group of the users who interact with @pandemic_Covid-19, official account of the World Health Organization (WHO). This research contributes to the social sciences, focusing on sociocultural interaction through the use of the social network Twitter. It describes the link between sociocultural factors and the level of sentiment on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords

COVID-19
Sociocultural factors
Netnography
Twitter
Sentiment analysis

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