What Are You Anxious About? Examining Subjects of Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic
What Are You Anxious About? Examining Subjects of Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic
复制标题
DOI：
10.48550/arxiv.2209.13595
复制
发表时间：
2022-09
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
L. L. Chen-L.;Steven R. Wilson;Sophie Lohmann;D. Negraia
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
L. L. Chen-L.;Steven R. Wilson;Sophie Lohmann;D. Negraia
在大流行的不同阶段，COVID-19 对公众的心理健康造成了不成比例的影响。我们使用计算方法来捕获引发公众对大流行的焦虑的具体方面，并调查这些方面如何随着时间的推移而变化。首先，我们使用主题分析方法在 r/COVID19\_support 的 Reddit 帖子样本 (N=86) 中确定了九个焦虑主题 (SOA)。然后，我们通过在手动注释样本 (N=793) 上训练算法来注释较大时间顺序样本 (N=6,535) 中的 SOA，从而量化 Reddit 用户的焦虑。这九个 SOA 与最近开发的各种流行病焦虑测量量表中的项目相一致。我们观察到，自疫情爆发以来的前八个月，Reddit 用户对健康风险的担忧仍然很高。尽管后来发生的病例激增，但这些担忧却大大减少了。总体而言，随着疫情的发展，用户披露 SOA 的语言变得不那么激烈。然而，在本研究期间，对心理健康和未来的担忧稳步增加。人们还倾向于使用比健康风险或死亡问题更强烈的语言来描述心理健康问题。我们的研究结果表明，尽管由于采取适当的对策，COVID-19 作为一种健康威胁逐渐减弱，但公众的心理健康状况并不一定会改善。我们的系统为人口健康和流行病学学者及时研究引发大流行焦虑的方面奠定了基础。
COVID-19 poses disproportionate mental health consequences to the public during different phases of the pandemic. We use a computational approach to capture the specific aspects that trigger the public's anxiety about the pandemic and investigate how these aspects change over time. First, we identified nine subjects of anxiety (SOAs) in a sample of Reddit posts (N=86) from r/COVID19\_support using the thematic analysis approach. Then, we quantified Reddit users' anxiety by training algorithms on a manually annotated sample (N=793) to annotate the SOAs in a larger chronological sample (N=6,535). The nine SOAs align with items in various recently developed pandemic anxiety measurement scales. We observed that Reddit users' concerns about health risks remained high in the first eight months since the pandemic started. These concerns diminished dramatically despite the surge of cases occurring later. In general, users' language disclosing the SOAs became less intense as the pandemic progressed. However, worries about mental health and the future steadily increased throughout the period covered in this study. People also tended to use more intense language to describe mental health concerns than health risk or death concerns. Our results suggest that the public's mental health condition does not necessarily improve despite COVID-19 as a health threat gradually weakening due to appropriate countermeasures. Our system lays the groundwork for population health and epidemiology scholars to examine aspects that provoke pandemic anxiety in a timely fashion.