Anti-stigma narratives and emotional comfort against health crisis: a context analysis of UGC short videos from patients with COVID-19 infections

Abstract

Patients narratives are being recorded increasingly frequently and spontaneously in short user produced content (UGC) films, which may have an impact on the vlogger’s health as well as the public’s comprehension of the relevant health concerns. This paper addressed three research questions regarding the population characteristics of UGC video publishers, the narrative theme of the videos, and the emotional orientation of the commenters. This study aimed to deepen our understanding of COVID-19 patients’ narrative intentions and emotional needs through the theoretical frameworks of theory of planned behavior (TPB) and negative dominance theory (NDT). We collected 335 videos from 28 COVID-19 patients and 572,052 comments as samples on Douyin platform, the largest short-video website in China. Using Latent Semantic Analysis, we analyzed the descriptive information of the video blogs, the narrative textual information of the videos, and the emotional orientation of the comments. Our findings revealled seven categories of narrative themes, with 52.1% of video comments exhibiting a positive emotional orientation. Within a framework integrating TPB and NDT theories, we analyzed the behavioral intentions of vloggers and viewers during COVID-19 epidemic, and interpreted the persistent posting of videos and the active posting of comments as positive actions that counteracted the multiple effects of negative messages. This study contributes to the understanding of individual narratives in macro-risk communication, both theoretically and empirically, and offers policy recommendations in relevant fields.