Social representations of COVID-19 vaccines: Exploration of user-generated comments via online video sharing during the first year of the pandemic

The current study aimed to explore the public understanding of COVID-19 vaccines and the social representations emerging from a corpus of user-generated comments on YouTube videos posted during the year following the World Health Organization's declaration of the novel coronavirus as pandemic....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of Pacific Rim psychology Vol. 17
Main Authors de Rosa, Annamaria Silvana, Fino, Emanuele, Holman, Andrei Corneliu, Hanna-Khalil, Bishoy
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.01.2023
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Coronaviruses
COVID-19 vaccines
False information
Immunization
Social networks
United Kingdom > UK
United States > US
COVID-19
vaccine
topic modelling
public understanding
social representations
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Summary:The current study aimed to explore the public understanding of COVID-19 vaccines and the social representations emerging from a corpus of user-generated comments on YouTube videos posted during the year following the World Health Organization's declaration of the novel coronavirus as pandemic. We used Structural Topic Modelling to process the text and identified a 10-topic solution as the best to represent the corpus of text data. The exploration of the topics showed a complex landscape of social representations underlying a plurality of perspectives, which we interpreted as reflecting different users’ needs to make sense of the unprecedented events. Implications for theory, future research, and intervention for health psychology and policy are discussed.
ISSN:1834-4909
1834-4909
DOI:10.1177/18344909221147648