Document Type
Article
Abstract
The understanding of the public response to COVID-19 vaccines is the key success factor to control the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the public response, there is a need to explore public opinion. Traditional surveys are expensive and time-consuming, address limited health topics, and obtain small-scale data. Twitter can provide a great opportunity to understand public opinion regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The current study proposes an approach using computational and human coding methods to collect and analyze a large number of tweets to provide a wider perspective on the COVID-19 vaccine. This study identifies the sentiment of tweets using a machine learning rule-based approach, discovers major topics, explores temporal trend and compares topics of negative and non-negative tweets using statistical tests, and discloses top topics of tweets having negative and non-negative sentiment. Our findings show that the negative sentiment regarding the COVID-19 vaccine had a decreasing trend between November 2020 and February 2021. We found Twitter users have discussed a wide range of topics from vaccination sites to the 2020 U.S. election between November 2020 and February 2021. The findings show that there was a significant difference between tweets having negative and non-negative sentiment regarding the weight of most topics. Our results also indicate that the negative and non-negative tweets had different topic priorities and focuses. This research illustrates that Twitter data can be used to explore public opinion regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Vaccines, Volume 9, Issue 10, 2021.
APA Citation
Karami, A., Zhu, M., Goldschmidt, B., Boyajieff, H. R., & Najafabadi, M. M. (2021). COVID-19 Vaccine and Social Media in the US: Exploring Emotions and Discussions on Twitter. Vaccines, 9(10), 1059. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9101059