CHICAGO, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) -- Social media data can be used as a complementary source of information alongside traditional data sources like phone-based polling to gauge public opinion about health issues, a study by University of Illinois (UI) researchers in social psychology and marketing found.
An analysis of online communications on Twitter about the public health challenges of the Zika virus correlated highly with a Zika-related analysis of traditional survey data from landline and cellular phones.
"Our results demonstrate that it's possible to uncover and analyze information from Twitter communications that are associated with public health crises," said Dolores Albarracin, UI professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "The common perception is that what people read on social media might not be representative of mainstream sentiment but rather a biased or extreme representation. It turns out that, in this domain, social media, specifically Twitter in our research, represents exactly the average of the real-life population of the U.S."
The researchers also analyzed Twitter data about the Zika virus outbreak by searching for Zika-related keywords using the site's application programming interface. They winnowed the resulting dataset of 3.8 million tweets to an aggregated set that matched the time period of the more traditional phone-based survey data.
The results demonstrated a high ability to identify community attitudes, knowledge and behaviors in a timely manner and at low cost on social media, Albarracin said.
"The survey data of the phone responses correlated moderately to highly with what was going on in real time on Twitter," she said.
The study was "a proof of concept that we can make these inferences based on social media conversations and establish surveillance systems that rely on social media postings," Albarracin said.
The study also has implications for public health.
"If there's a public health crisis, or if you wish to see how people are responding to a public health crisis in real time, Twitter would certainly be a valid portal to look at," Albarracin said. "It's cheap, it's fast and it's ubiquitous, whereas traditional phone polling is slow and expensive, it can take weeks and can cost tens of thousands of dollars per week, if not more, to gather data."
Social media could potentially also be an effective tool to launch public health campaigns, Albarracin said.
"Clearly, people will talk about their health online, and they seem to have no qualms about obtaining information about public health issues from social media," she said. "People aren't afraid to go public and crowd-source their health concerns."
The methodology could be applied to collections of tweets from other domains of interest, from business to politics.
"If you're trying to do market research, instead of calling people, you could obtain these measures of consumer attitudes through social media," said Albarracin.
The study will be published in the journal JMIR Public Health and Surveillance.
