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Using Twitter for Nursing Research: A Tweet Analysis on Heat Illness and Health
Author(s) -
Smith Daniel J.,
Mac Valerie V.T.,
Hertzberg Vicki S.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of nursing scholarship
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.009
H-Index - 80
eISSN - 1547-5069
pISSN - 1527-6546
DOI - 10.1111/jnu.12654
Subject(s) - social media , relevance (law) , heat illness , psychological intervention , set (abstract data type) , content analysis , sociology of health and illness , sentiment analysis , computer science , nursing , medicine , psychology , data science , health care , world wide web , artificial intelligence , sociology , social science , physics , meteorology , political science , law , economics , programming language , economic growth
Aim To provide an example of a tweet analysis for nurse researchers using Twitter in their research. Design A content analysis using tweets about “heat illness + health.” Methods Tweets were pulled from Twitter’s application programming interface with premium access using Postman and the key words “heat illness + health.” All data cleaning and analysis was performed in R Version 3.5.2, and the tweet set was analyzed for term frequency, sentiment, and topic modeling. Principal R packages included LDAvis, tidytext, tm, and zyuzhet. Results 6,317 tweets were analyzed with a date range of April 6, 2009, to December 30, 2019. The most common terms in the tweets were heat ( n = 4,532), illness ( n = 4,085), and health ( n = 2,257). Sentiment analysis showed that the majority of tweets (55%) had a negative sentiment. Topic modeling showed that there were three topics within the tweet set: increasing impact, prevention and safety, and symptoms. Conclusions Twitter can be a useful tool for nursing researchers, serving as a viable adjunct to current research methodologies. This practical example has facilitated a deeper understanding of the social media representation of heat illness and health that can be applied to other research. Clinical Relevance Twitter serves as a tool for collecting health information for multiple groups, ranging from clinicians and researchers to patients. By utilizing the plethora of data that comes from the platform, we can work towards developing theories and interventions related to numerous health conditions and phenomena.