Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: May 2, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: May 2, 2022 - May 16, 2022
Date Accepted: Feb 25, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Analysing discussions around Rural Health on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic: a social network analysis of Twitter data
ABSTRACT
Background:
Individuals from rural areas are increasingly using social media as a means of communication, receiving information, or actively complaining of inequalities and injustices.
Objective:
The aim of our study is to analyse the conversations about rural health taking place on Twitter during a particular phase of the COVID-19 pandemic
Methods:
This study captured 57 days’ worth of Twitter data from June to August 2021 related to rural health using English language keywords. The study utilised social network analysis and natural language processing to analyse the data.
Results:
It was found that Twitter served as a fruitful platform to raise awareness of problems faced by those living in rural areas. Overall, Twitter was utilised in rural areas to express complaints, to debate, and share information.
Conclusions:
Twitter could be leveraged as a powerful social listening tool for individuals and organizations that want to gain insight into popular narratives around rural health.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.