Emotional Attitudes of Chinese Citizens on Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Outbreak: Analysis of Social Media Data

作者：Lining Shen, Rui Yao, Wenli Zhang, Richard Evans, Guang Cao, Zhiguo Zhang · 发表于：JMIR Medical Informatics · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.2196/27079 · 被引用次数：29 · 研究领域：Misinformation and Its Impacts、Public Relations and Crisis Communication、Advanced Technologies in Various Fields

Background Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed citywide lockdown measures on January 23, 2020. Neighboring cities in Hubei Province followed suit with the government enforcing social distancing measures to restrict the spread of the disease throughout the province. Few studies have examined the emotional attitudes of citizens as expressed on social media toward the imposed social distancing measures and the factors that affected their emotions. Objective The aim of this study was twofold. First, we aimed to detect the emotional attitudes of different groups of users on Sina Weibo toward the social distancing measures imposed by the People’s Government of Hubei Province. Second, the influencing factors of their emotions, as well as the impact of the imposed measures on users’ emotions, was studied. Methods Sina Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms, was chosen as the primary data source. The time span of selected data was from January 21, 2020, to March 24, 2020, while analysis was completed in late June 2020. Bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) was used to analyze users’ emotions, while logistic regression analysis was employed to explore the influence of explanatory variables on users’ emotions, such as age and spatial location. Further, the moderating effects of social distancing measures on the relationship between user characteristics and users’ emotions were assessed by observing the interaction effects between the mea...