Motivating the Inclusion of Construct Validity in Social Media Monitoring: How to Leverage Surveys to Measure Trust in Vaccines on Twitter
Open AccessPeoples’ opinions affect the success of modern socio-technical systems. These opinions can be about constructs that are difficult to measure. Trust in vaccines, one such construct, is a prominent social part of a modern system, vaccination, whose variance can affect the overall system's success. Measuring trust in vaccines with traditional surveys can be slow and costly – unfortunate downsides given public health's fight against disease outbreaks. Social media measures have the potential to mitigate some of these weaknesses, but can perform poorly when measuring constructs that are hard to observe directly or that have many related sub-constructs. In this dissertation, we show how incorporating the notion of construct validity aids us to develop better measures of difficult constructs on social media. Specifically, we establish a novel measure of trust in vaccines on Twitter - the first time to our knowledge that a social media measure for an opinion has incorporated traditional survey methods to leverage the gold standard of opinion measurement. Among other parts of construct validity, we focus on verifying both convergent and discriminant validity in social media measures of opinions. We expect our findings to generalize to other socio-technical systems facing similar dynamics.
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