Rapidly Testing Policymakers' Assumptions Using Social Media: A Systematic Approach Applied to Public Health

Policymakers in public health have been facing growing trouble recently: on the one hand, the public's trust in policymakers has been declining over the years. On the other hand, the turmoil of international politics has created an unpredictable environment for policy consistency. Much of these debates have originated, developed, escalated, and perpetuated on social media. Naturally, to understand the public's opinion of specific health issues, many researchers in public health have turned to seek answers using social media data directly. However, studying social media is not a trivial task. Scholars in qualitative and quantitative methods have identified many problems and fallacies in social media research. In this dissertation, I will systematically review three main projects I finished and published during his Ph.D. years and discuss how my works are able to rapidly test several different hypotheses that emerged among researchers and decision makers of each field.

Author

• Hu, Dian

Language

• en

Keyword

• Latent Dirichlet Allocation
• Social Media
• Public Health
• Policymakers
• Qualitative Annotation
• Science and Technology Studies

Date created

• 2022

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Systems Engineering

Degree

• Ph.D.

Advisor

• Broniatowski, David A.

Committee Member(s)

• Broniatowski, David A.
• Helveston, John
• Mazzuchi, Thomas A.
• Liu, Cindy M.
• Gralla, Erica L.

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/cz30pt486