Vaccine Narratives on Mommy Blogs: what machine-learning tells us

A fascinating paper appeared today in the Journal of Medical Internet Research:

"Mommy Blogs" and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites.

by Timothy Tangherlini and colleagues.

The title is a mouth-full, but what did they do?

The researchers knew that social media offer great opportunities to explore how people talk about health care on a very large scale. They selected two websites where parents seek and discuss information about health: the so-called 'Mommy Blogs'. They wanted to develop an automated machine-learning method to discover how parents talk about vaccines.

Looking at a data-set of 1.99 million posts, contributed by 40,056 users (and were viewed 20.12 million times) on two parenting websites, they determined first the topics of discussions. Then they extracted the underlying stories and story fragments, using techniques that impress me as mysterious: generative statistical-mechanical narrative models.

What did they find?

They found that a lot of stories were about exemption from vaccination requirements. Most narratives related to seeking exemption and to a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Discussions and stories showed that parents used religion or belief to get exemption from vaccination. Fear of adverse reactions played a key role, whether or not these reactions were truly associated with vaccines. Such stories persisted on the websites, even when parents left the discussion forms. In most vaccination stories from the sites they analysed, it was taken for granted that vaccines, and not vaccine preventable diseases, pose a threat to children. Because vaccines are seen as a threat, parents focus on sharing successful strategies for avoiding them. When new parents join such sites, they may be exposed to the 'endemic narrative frameworks' in the forums, which may influence their health decision making.

Considerations

This type of analysis is new to me. I knew that data mining and text mining techniques are being used increasingly in health care, this is the first article I read about an application to knowledge, attitudes and believes of parents about vaccination.

Social media play such an important role in daily life, and increasingly so, that this field of research seems to me a relevant addition to the field of public health science.

Read the full article here:

[pdf-embedder url="http://publichealth.jmir.org/article/viewFile/publichealth_v2i2e166/2"]

Did you like this post? Let me know by liking our Facebook Page below. You can also share your comments and ideas about this post