Communicating diabetes and diets on Twitter – a semantic content analysis



: Kristina Eriksson-Backa, Kim Holmberg, Stefan Ek

Publisher: INDERSCIENCE PUBLISHERS

: 2016

: International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations

: 16

: 1

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJNVO.2016.075133(external)



This paper analyses: 1) the semantic content of tweets discussing

diabetes and diets: 2) the conversational connections of those tweeting and

those being mentioned in the tweets. The content analysis of the tweets aims at

mapping what kinds of diets are mentioned in conversations about diabetes and

in what context. Our data consists of 9,042 tweets containing the words

‘diabetes’ and ‘diet’. The findings indicate that analysing Twitter conversations

can be a fruitful and an efficient way to map public opinions about diabetes and

diets, as well as other medical issues that concern many people. The results also

showed that many private persons act as diabetes advocates spreading

information and news about diabetes and diets. Surveying these topics can be

useful for healthcare practitioners; as these are in contact with patients with

diabetes, it is important that they are aware of both the most discussed topics

and the most common information sources, who are often laymen.

Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 21:28