Revealing public attitudes toward mobile cabin hospitals during Covid-19 pandemic: Sentiment and topic analyses using social media data in China

Abstract

The diverse and ambivalent public attitudes toward Mobile Cabin Hospitals (MCHs) markedly influence MCHs’ social sustainability. Conventional studies regarding MCHs’ public attitudes rely heavily on survey-based approaches (e.g., questionnaires) that suffer from limited respondents, short durations, and narrow geographical coverages, overlooking tempo-spatial variations of MCHs’ public attitudes. Hence, this study proposes a social media data (SMD)-based approach to reveal public attitudes toward MCHs. It consists of MCH-related SMD collection, SMD preprocessing and annotation, sentiment and topic analysis model development, model performance verification, and statistical analyses of public sentiments and topics. This newly devised approach has been demonstrated for mining 413,572 pieces of MCH-related SMD covering MCH policy lifecycle in China. The findings reveal that (i) positive sentiment can surpass or fall below negative sentiments toward MCHs, which is correlated with the number of Covid-19 cases (NoCC), and (ii) the rankings of public concerns on 8 positive topics shift between two patterns temporally and spatially with NoCC, while the rankings among 6 negative topics remain stable for China's MCHs. This study not only offers an SMD-based supplementary approach for exploring public attitudes toward MCHs but also updates current understandings to enhance their social sustainability.