Social media use in public health and policy study

ABSTRACT

The Internet plays a significant role in health information searching, sharing, and emotional support. Chapter 1 explores the complementary and substitutive value of online health information from diseases, especially chronic diseases, health insurance, barriers to health resources, and their interaction effects with income. Furthermore, social networks such as Twitter enable people to interact with each other and share health-related concerns and emotions in an effective and novel way, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person communication became more inconvenient under the stay-at-home policy. Public emotions from these social network data have increasingly attracted scholars' attention because of their significant value in predicting public behaviors and public opinions. Chapter 2 examines 1) the spatial-temporal clustering trends of negative emotions (or spillover effects);2) whether health policies such as stay-at-home policy and political ideology are associated with spatiotemporal emotion patterns towards COVID-19.During COVID-19, public mobility experienced a significant reduction as many people's work environment shifted from workplace to home or offline to online, especially under policies like the stay-at-home policy (Wen, Sheng, & Sharp, 2021). However, little has been done to examine the relationships between public emotions mined from social networks and the public behavioral responses to the COVID-19 crisis, especially considering the interaction effects between public emotions and public policy and political leaders' political ideology. Chapter 3 fills these gaps by examining the relationships between public emotions and working modes, and the interaction effects between public emotion, public policy, and political leaders' political ideology on working modes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)