Leveraging Social Media to Promote Public Health Knowledge: Example of Cancer Awareness via Twitter

作者：Songhua Xu, Christopher Markson, Kaitlin Light Costello, Cathleen Y. Xing, Kitaw Demissie, Adana A. M. Llanos · 发表于：JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.2196/publichealth.5205 · 被引用次数：141 · 研究领域：Social Media in Health Education、Data-Driven Disease Surveillance、Health Literacy and Information Accessibility

BACKGROUND: As social media becomes increasingly popular online venues for engaging in communication about public health issues, it is important to understand how users promote knowledge and awareness about specific topics. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to examine the frequency of discussion and differences by race and ethnicity of cancer-related topics among unique users via Twitter. METHODS: Tweets were collected from April 1, 2014 through January 21, 2015 using the Twitter public streaming Application Programming Interface (API) to collect 1% of public tweets. Twitter users were classified into racial and ethnic groups using a new text mining approach applied to English-only tweets. Each ethnic group was then analyzed for frequency in cancer-related terms within user timelines, investigated for changes over time and across groups, and measured for statistical significance. RESULTS: Observable usage patterns of the terms "cancer", "breast cancer", "prostate cancer", and "lung cancer" between Caucasian and African American groups were evident across the study period. We observed some variation in the frequency of term usage during months known to be labeled as cancer awareness months, particularly September, October, and November. Interestingly, we found that of the terms studied, "colorectal cancer" received the least Twitter attention. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the study provide evidence that social media can serve as a very powerful and important tool in implemen...