ABSTRACT
PurposeThis brief report aims to provide the first large-scale analysis of public discourse regarding family violence and the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter. Method: We analyzed 301,606 Tweets related to family violence and COVID-19 from April 12 to July 16, 2020, for this study. We used the machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and identified salient themes, topics, and representative Twitter examples. ResultsWe extracted nine themes on family violence and COVID-19 pandemic, including (1) the Impact of COVID-19 on family violence (e.g., rising rates, hotline calls increased, murder & homicide); (2) the types (e.g., child abuse, domestic violence, sexual violence) and (3) forms of family violence (e.g., physical aggression, coercive control); (4) risk factors of family violence (e.g., alcohol abuse, financial constraints, gun, quarantine); (5) victims of family violence (e.g., LGBTQ, women, and women of color, children); (6) social services of family violence (e.g., hotlines, social workers, confidential services, shelters, funding); (7) law enforcement response (e.g., 911 calls, police arrest, protective orders, abuse reports); (8) Social movement/awareness (e.g., support victims, raise awareness); and (9) domestic violence-related news (e.g., Tara Reade, Melissa Derosa). ConclusionsThe COVID-19 has an impact on family violence. This report overcomes the limitation of existing scholarship that lacks data for consequences of COVID-19 on family violence. We contribute to the understanding of family violence during the pandemic by providing surveillance in Tweets, which is essential to identify potentially effective policy programs in offering targeted support for victims and survivors and preparing for the next wave.
ABSTRACT
Objective To investigate how suicide microblog users in China "act" and "speak" differently from other microblog users without suicide idea.Methods The suicide group consisted of 31 Chinese microblog users identified as suicide via online information provided by a Sina microblog user,and the control group consisted of 30 active microblog users without suicide idea screened by using suicide-related psychological scales.The differences in 10 microblog use behavioral characteristics and 88 linguistic characteristics between the suicide group and the control group were compared with normality test and rank sum test respectively.Results In the behavioral characteristics,the suicide group used hyperlinks and "@" less frequently than the control group [0.04 (0.04) vs.0.06 (0.04),P=0.029;0.60 (0.27) vs.0.69 (0.18),P=0.028],and was more self-focused [0.47 (0.25) vs.0.30 (0.10),P=0.010].In the linguistic characteristics,the suicide group showed less frequency in using measure word,work related word and apostrophe than the control group (P＜0.05),and showed more frequency in using pronoun,personal pronoun,third person singular,non-specific pronoun,word expressing social experience,word expressing anxiety,word expressing exclusion,sexual word,religious word,second person singular,human being related word,negative emotion related word,anger related word,sadness or death related word (P＜0.05).Conclusion Suicides seemed to interact less with others,showed more self-concern and more negative expressions,use more cognitively exclusive,death-related,religion-related words,and use less work-related words.The results of this study might be helpful for the research on suicide among netizen.
