Abstract
Over the past decade, the percentage of adults in the United States who use some form of social media has roughly doubled, increasing from 36 percent in early 2009 to 72 percent in 2019. There has been a corresponding increase in research aimed at understanding opinions and beliefs that are expressed online. However, the generalizability of findings from social media research is a subject of ongoing debate. Social media platforms are conduits of both information and misinformation about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy. Our research objective was to examine whether we can draw similar conclusions from Twitter and national survey data about the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and a broader set of beliefs. In 2018 we conducted a nationally representative survey of parents in the United States informed by a literature review to ask their views on a range of topics, including vaccine side effects, conspiracy theories, and understanding of science. We developed a set of keyword-based queries corresponding to each of the belief items from the survey and pulled matching tweets from 2017. We performed the data pull of the most recent full year of data in 2018. Our primary measures of belief covariation were the loadings and scores of the first principal components obtained using principal component analysis (PCA) from the two sources. We found that, after using manually coded weblinks in tweets to infer stance, there was good qualitative agreement between the first principal component loadings and scores using survey and Twitter data. This held true after we took the additional processing step of resampling the Twitter data based on the number of topics that an individual tweeted about, as a means of correcting for differential representation for elicited (survey) vs. volunteered (Twitter) beliefs. Overall, the results show that analyses using Twitter data may be generalizable in certain contexts, such as assessing belief covariation.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the percent of adults in the United States who use some form of social media has roughly doubled, increasing from 36 percent in early 2009 to 72 percent in 2019 [1]
We found very good qualitative and quantitative agreement between the first principal component of the principal component analysis (PCA) using survey and Twitter data after removing bots and inferring, based on manually coded weblink domains, whether individuals agreed or disagreed with the topic they tweeted about
We focus on the results for the first principal component because scree plots from the survey PCAs suggested that there was one dominant principal component
Summary
The percent of adults in the United States who use some form of social media has roughly doubled, increasing from 36 percent in early 2009 to 72 percent in 2019 [1]. There has been a corresponding increase in research aimed at understanding opinions and beliefs that are expressed online [2]. Social media and other online platforms are frequently cited as sources of misinformation about vaccines and vaccine hesitant beliefs [5,6,7]. Attempts to increase parents’ scientific understanding of how vaccines work to increase their willingness to fully vaccinate their children can be ineffective and even increase vaccine hesitancy [11]. This suggests that vaccine hesitancy may result from broader social and cognitive processes beyond understanding and acceptance of scientific evidence around the safety and efficacy of vaccines
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